Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  A couple of weeks later Bernie would announce his candidacy to a scant gathering of reporters outside Congress with such a blunt lack of fanfare that he prefaced the whole thing with “We don’t have an endless amount of time . . .”

  At the time, I couldn’t envision how a socialist septuagenarian could almost defeat Hillary and in the process become a pop-culture icon. I’d picked up enough about economic policy covering the 2008 campaign through the financial crisis, including multiple interviews with Hillary, Warren Buffett, and Obama, to recognize that Bernie wasn’t sure exactly how he’d make wealth more equitably distributed. I agreed with Hillary’s assessment that Bernie didn’t know anything. The more I pressed him for details on how he’d implement “a big bank breakup,” as Larry David’s SNL version of Bernie later put it, the brusquer and more irritated he became. He always returned to the same uncluttered, irrefutable point that the rich had become too rich and the American economy had gotten entirely out of whack. Toward the end of our chat, Bernie—as if he could hear my inner voice saying, So when do we get to the part about Hillary?—said “This is not about Hillary Clinton.” No, he said if he ran his campaign, it would be about inequality, “about people working longer hours and earning less than they used to.” It was John Edwards and the “Two Americas,” minus the telegenic smile, the good hair, and the love child.

  Exactly a year after our first coffee, Bernie and I were back in New York. But this time I was one of hundreds of reporters who sat in the bone-dry, sunken fountain of Washington Square Park not far from where the beatniks rioted in 1961 and Allen Ginsberg read his poetry and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protesters had set up tents. It was five days before the New York primary. There were people everywhere, twenty-seven thousand by one tally, “angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient, heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” . . . or, Bernie Sanders. They filled the streets of Greenwich Village weaving through police barricades and giving the area that had long since turned condo the throwback smell of some choice kind bud. The Bernie rally had the feel of Woodstock and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory riots and an episode of Girls all rolled together in a springtime Feel-the-Bern bacchanal. I hadn’t felt that kind of collective yearning, that massive gulped-down-the-Kool-Aid-and-asked-for-seconds crusade for a political candidate since I climbed onto the stage set up under St. Louis’s Gateway Arch on a sunny afternoon in the fall of 2008 and looked out on an ocean of a hundred thousand people all chanting, “O-BA-MA, O-BA-MA.”

  A few weeks earlier in Portland, a delicate songbird had perched on Bernie’s podium. “I think there may be some symbolism here,” he said to the crowd of eleven thousand screaming fans. Hillary had been right to brace for defeats—#BirdieSanders went on to annihilate her in Washington and Wisconsin, Wyoming and Idaho, Hawaii and Alaska, collecting a paltry number of delegates but a hell of a lot of chutzpah. “Do not tell Secretary Clinton—she’s getting a little nervous,” Bernie said in Laramie, Wyoming. “But I believe we’ve got an excellent chance to win New York and a lot of delegates in that state.”

  His swagger filtered down to the Bros who believed the lamestream media and the Democratic Establishment were colluding to help Hillary. The Bros called me a “cunt playing the Cunt Card” who clearly needed to “take it like a man in the ass.” The Bros told me that maybe if I hadn’t spent entirely too much time “sucking Bill Clinton’s dick,” I’d appreciate Bernie’s plan for free college. If I was delayed at an airport and bored, I’d write back, “You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Or on the rare occasion the Bros emailed me from a work account, I’d try to freak them out. “Are you speaking for yourself or is this the official position of GenSales?” But mostly, I ignored them and told myself these were harmless white guys in their boxer shorts who couldn’t find jobs or get laid and took some comfort in settling into their parents’ basements to troll girl reporters. After all, I’d had my own toe-dip into online trolling (minus the oral sex references) when no one would hire me. Besides, the Bros weren’t wrong. I didn’t know fuck all about how they were feeling. I’d had no clue Bernie would become a geriatric Che, a white-haired white knight whose promise of ending “corporate greed and a rigged economy” would not only win over the kids but thrust them into open, angry revolt against Hillary.

  As for Hillary, she was so done with her Esteemed Opponent that she could hardly stand to be on the same stage as Bernie at the Brooklyn debate. She didn’t see any real difference between Bernie’s peddling of empty promises to his hordes of sexist supporters and Trump’s campaign, except that people seemed marginally better groomed at Trump rallies. One person who talked to Hillary about her views on Trump crowds vs. Bernie crowds broke it down to me as “at least white supremacists shaved.”

  One of Hillary’s favorite moments in the primary—right up there with when she captured the nomination—came when Bernie nosedived in an editorial interview with the Daily News. He appeared unable to fully explain how he’d break up the banks. “Do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?” the paper asked. “Well, I don’t know if the Fed has that. But I think the administration can have it.” After months of saying Wall Street executives should be jailed, Bernie wasn’t sure if there were laws in place to bring about such indictments. “I believe that is the case. Do I have them in front of me now, legal statutes? No, I don’t,” he said. He even botched a question about how he rides the subway. “You get a token and you get in,” Bernie said.

  “Wrong.”

  Brooklyn blasted the transcript out to the press and donors (“MUST READ: Bernie Sanders’ Enlightening Meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board”). They hung it on the walls. Hillary tried to rub in her New York credentials with a ride on the No. 4 train, even if it took her five swipes of her MetroCard to go through the turnstile at 161st Street in the Bronx. (Hillary Clinton’s MetroCard Adventure: Swipe. Wince. Repeat, the Times headline read.)

  I walked along the security perimeter of Washington Square Park. I asked people if they thought Bernie, who, as my profession liked to say, “lagged significantly in the delegate math”—as if a political revolution could be reduced to arithmetic—still had a chance to defeat Hillary. Aging hippies waved signs that said the revolution is here. A guy who looked exactly like a young Lou Reed held a poster with the words democracy vs. oligarchy, humanity vs. greed. Even if Hillary could’ve attracted the same all-you-can-eat buffet of random rallying cries, her corporate campaign regularly confiscated homemade signs. Brooklyn thought it best that the Everydays hold professionally produced signs that displayed the message du jour rather than something made with love and some finger paint and magic marker. In Phoenix, I watched a young Clinton staffer rip from the hands of a little girl an i ♥ hillary sign she’d drawn in crayon in art class that afternoon. They gave her a blue breaking down barriers sign with the campaign’s H-arrow logo and hillaryclinton.com at the bottom.

  I dove into the crowd like an anthropologist, eager to understand why young women, in particular, weren’t With Her. But as I talked to so many students from NYU—and as their mouths moved and I followed up with “What’s your major?” and “How do you spell Delilah?”—I was secretly seething with resentment. I’d wanted to attend NYU ever since our seventh-grade Hobby Middle School trip to Washington and New York.

  I remember when our tour bus arrived in Greenwich Village, our faces pressed to the windows to gaze out at Christopher Street and Stonewall. I’d never seen men holding hands before, and I distinctly remember swooning over a woman with an emerald-green Mohawk and black leather vest with only a black lace bra underneath. That’s when Brandy said, loud enough so that I could hear her several rows in front, “Amy’s so weird, I bet she wants to live here.” She was right. From that point on, I was determined to go to NYU and live in a rundown dorm on MacDougal Street and pierce my nose and wear a pleather skirt to the Tunnel every Thursday night.

  For the next year of middle school and four years o
f high school, I wore an NYU T-shirt at least twice a week and acted as if going there was a done deal. I’d say, “I’ll be in New York by then . . .” and “I’ll have to live in Greenwich Village to be close to my classes . . .” But I’d never actually talked to my parents about this plan until my junior year.

  One evening I tiptoed into my parents’ bedroom in my tattered NYU shirt holding a folder, with NYU’s white-and-purple torch, that laid out the various tuition and financing options. My dad lay on the bed as he usually did late into weeknights, legal papers spread out over his lap and his brown leather briefcase propped open like a bear trap beside him. My mom sat on the floor grading papers. I’d rehearsed all of it in my head for so long. “I could do a work-study program . . .” I started. “I’ve got all this experience hostessing already, and they have this program where . . .” NYU wasn’t up for discussion. “We’ve talked about this,” my dad said. “There’s a perfectly good state school an hour away in Austin.” In trying to prove how adult I was, how ready I was to live in New York, I threw an absolute balls-out, arms-flailing temper tantrum. “YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING,” I sobbed. “NYU isn’t a state school. It’s PRIVATE and PRESTIGIOUS.” At this point, my sister Stef, who’d been on my side about fleeing Texas (she’d dreamed of Georgetown before ending up at UT), heard my fit and turned on me. “You seriously think Mom and Dad are going to pay twenty-five thousand dollars a year so you can go be a druggie in New York?”

  I didn’t even mail in my application. I spent the fifty-dollar application fee on tickets to the Primus concert and a bag full of hallucinogenic mushrooms that my neighbor Travis grew on cow patties. I still got my nose pierced, a silver loop too big for my face that sat in a dollop of pink pus on my left nostril. This accessory lasted exactly two months until my mom told me they’d stop paying my UT tuition if I didn’t “take that crap out of your nose this second.”

  I looked at these twiggy, unshaven girls living in the West Village on their parents’ backs. They wore gray wigs with peach latex designed to look like Bernie’s super-hip receding hairline. They had tight-fitting T-shirts with Bernie’s black glasses and slogans like bernin’ with passion and bernie is bae and brooklyn for bernie. My envy began to fade. I’d been a brat. My dad had been right all along. The perfectly good state school an hour away—and $4,000 a semester—had been exactly what I needed. But I couldn’t see it then. I must have seemed to him like one of the unwashed masses who couldn’t see that Hillary was the obvious, practical choice.

  Tim Robbins stood onstage under the miniature, lit-up Arc de Triomphe at Washington Square Park. “We are supporting a candidate that has taken principled positions when others have compromised,” he said. “What a radical concept: a politician that has a moral bottom line.”

  Democrats were facing a general election against Trump, and Bernie’s campaign was still saying Hillary was the one who lacked a moral bottom line? She was a Methodist minister compared to Trump. But you’d never know talking to the crowd that night. The dozens of Bernie lovers I interviewed told me they wanted to read the transcripts of Hillary’s Wall Street speeches. They hadn’t forgiven her for voting for the Iraq War. They bemoaned her billionaire donors and her pussyfooting around whether she supports a fifteen-dollar minimum wage (“I think setting the goal to get to twelve dollars is the way to go, encouraging others to get to fifteen,” she said in the Brooklyn debate). They said she’d shamed Monica Lewinsky and that she’d been “bought and paid for” by corporations. Everything Trump would throw at Hillary and then some, hurled from the glossy lips of college girls that night.

  The day before the New York primary was a twenty-seven-hour whirlwind trailing Hillary as she posed for photos with Latino workers at the Hi-Tek Car Wash & Lube (slogan: “Lube it or Lose It”) in Elmhurst (“I’ve campaigned at lots of gas stations, some of which had car washes, but this is special!”), sipped tapioca bubble tea in Chinatown in Flushing (“Hm, I’ve never had squishy tea before”), and, at an East Village artisanal ice-cream shop owned by an ex-con, broke her rule of never eating in front of the press and devoured a milk chocolate and waffle ice-cream concoction named the Victory. It ended that night with the Irish. The Travelers filed into the courtyard of the Fitzpatrick Hotel near Grand Central, a little gem, owned by the donor and eligible bachelor John Fitzpatrick, that my Irish family (and no one else I knew) consider the height of New York luxury. Bill Clinton, in a green tie, and an Irish fiddle player warmed up the crowd. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. Hillary has spent an entire lifetime taking the stones out of the heart by making good things happen.” I’d heard Bill butcher lines of Yeats for years, but that one seemed particularly creative.

  After they learned that the Times’ Hillary reporter is “married to a Meath man” (as in County Meath), New York’s Irish power brokers adopted me as one of their own. I had a lot of sleazy sources whom I’d never spend time with if they weren’t potentially useful (see Hands Across America). But the Irish were like family. I loved their dark sense of humor and morose worldview. In the midst of the New York primary, I received anti-Semitic mail, including a brochure that showed a stereotypical Jew with a black hat and exaggerated, elongated nose, rising above the earth and engulfed in voracious flames, over the words “EVIL JEWS IN CHARGE!” An Irish friend took one look at it and shrugged, “Eh, at least you’re in charge.”

  I stayed around to drink a Magners, the Irish cider that I’d learned to order in lieu of Guinness. Strings of translucent lights hung overhead, and the fiddler played the reedy chords of “Rocky Road to Dublin.” I asked Bill how he’d first bonded with the Irish. This led to a ten-minute walk down memory lane about how the Irish had helped a redneck governor from Arkansas win the New York primary in 1992, and how in turn he’d approved Gerry Adams’s visa and helped end the Troubles. “You didn’t used to care about this when you went to New York, you just wanted the Irish to vote for you . . .” he said.

  I got home after midnight. I’d only had one pint but felt drunk. We had to be back on the van at 5:45 a.m. to watch Hillary vote in Chappaqua.

  That morning a light drizzle fell outside Douglas Grafflin Elementary School where Hillary’s well-heeled neighbors stood under golf umbrellas and held handmade signs and chanted “Hillary!” and “We love you!” Inside the basketball gym, Hillary leaned over to cast a ballot for herself. The Travelers barreled around her. We yelled our evergreen question, “Secretary! How are you feeling about tonight?” Hillary snapped, “Guys, it’s a private ballot,” and signaled to Brown Loafers. “Can we get the press out of here, please?”

  By the time Hillary came outside, the rain had stopped. The clouds had parted and the sun beat down. Again, that question, “How are you feeling about tonight?” Hillary looked over her shoulder at us. “I love New York,” she said.

  She bulldozed Bernie by sixteen points and came onstage at the Sheraton that night to twenty-five hundred screaming New Yorkers and the slow beat of “Empire State of Mind” filled the ballroom—“Concrete jungle where dreams are made of / There’s nothing you can’t do.”

  I’d already filed my story and lifted myself over the barricade set up around the press area to watch. I’d asked for an embargoed draft of Hillary’s remarks and a source-friend in Brooklyn instead texted me a meme of Sally Field accepting her second Oscar, arms hoisted overhead and the words, “You like me! You really like me!”

  36

  Writing Herstory

  I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men—at least they can cry.

  —Jean Rhys

  Brooklyn, June 2016

  At 8:21 p.m. ET on Monday, June 6, 2016, Hillary made history in the most Hillary way possible. The Associated Press flashed across the wire: BREAKING: @AP finds Clinton reached the number of delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination for president. Hillary had done something no woman in the 228-year history of the republic had ever come close to doing. Thing was, California had
n’t voted yet.

  She’d planned to do the whole history-making hoorah the following night in Brooklyn, under the glass-domed ceiling of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, eight years to the day after she dropped out of the 2008 primary. But the AP called a bunch of uncommitted superdelegates, those pesky party elders who got to vote for whatever candidate they wanted regardless of the will of the voters. That got Hillary to the magic 2,383 number of delegates needed to become the nominee. She didn’t want to win that way. The Bernie camp was already pushing the idea that Hillary would only win because of the party’s funky, undemocratic electoral system. She’d win because of the ESTABLISHMENT.

  Hillary stood backstage at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles when she saw the headline. She waited a while to go onstage as John Legend introduced her and downplayed the news. “I don’t care what the AP says about who won the nomination,” he said. “We need everybody to vote tomorrow.” She didn’t care about the other five states voting on Tuesday, but she couldn’t lose California, couldn’t even be close, or everyone would talk about her weaknesses, and we’d all write that even though she made history she “hobbled to her party’s nomination.”