Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  I was sitting in the front row, a few feet away. By then I knew it wasn’t pollen. Hillary had drowsy eyes and the reduced presence of a person who had popped a handful of extra-strength Tylenol when they should be in bed.

  Three hours later, at an “LGBT for Hillary” fund-raiser in the cavernous ballroom of Cipriani in lower Manhattan, Barbra Streisand sang a Trump-themed parody of “Send in the Clowns.” (“Is he that rich? / Maybe he’s poor? / ’Til he reveals his returns / Who can be sure? / Who needs this clown?”) Laverne Cox introduced Hillary, and she walked onstage in front of the blue velvet curtain to a standing ovation. She acted loopy from the start.

  “Wow. Thank you. Thank you. It’s sort of like the seventh-inning stretch,” Hillary said, resting her hands on the clear Lucite podium. “You know, I’ve been saying at events like this lately, I am all that stands between you and the apocalypse. Tonight, I’m all that stands between a much better outcome!”

  It got worse.

  Forgetting that the campaign allowed the press pool to cover her remarks, Hillary did her usual bit about the baskets. But like the 3-D printer that, the more times she said it, moved in Hillary’s mind from Waterloo to Moline, the three baskets of Trump voters had somehow become two. “You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Hillary said, pausing for comedic emphasis. “Right?”

  Amirite, folks?

  Babs was said to have cringed backstage. The Guys tried the “Clean Up in Aisle 7” approach. They explained that Hillary’s comments weren’t any different from what she’d been saying all along about the racism Trump’s campaign has fueled.

  By 2:06 p.m. the next day, Hillary issued a statement saying she regretted that she’d said “half.” Podesta released his own statement, saying Trump “has spent 15 months insulting nearly every group in America” and that “this is without a doubt deplorable—but this is who he is.”

  After the convention, donors asked Brooklyn what they planned to do to pull Hillary’s trust numbers out of the toilet. The answer was always the same: nothing. Podesta would explain, “I remember when no one trusted Bill Clinton, and he won twice.” That was true, but “Slick Willy” was different. Voters may not have trusted Clinton with their daughters, but they trusted that he was looking out for them. That wasn’t the case with Hillary, and laughing at tens of millions of Americans while surrounded by her rich, fabulous urbane friends at a fund-raiser at Cipriani wasn’t going to help. “I really messed up,” she told aides that night.

  On Sunday morning, Hillary arrived at Ground Zero to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and I dragged Bobby to a Flywheel class. Despite his cultural aversion to healthy food and light beer, Bobby is slim with broad shoulders and legs so long they stretch the length of our L-shaped sofa. I didn’t usually have the time or energy to do much marital nagging, but with the election in sight, I had visions about the active weekend routines that we’d soon adopt. With Hillary at the September 11 memorial service and the press pool keeping an eye on her, I had a free morning to lure my husband to a spin class.

  “C’mon, it will be fun,” I said the night before. I sat on the chaise, bought at a clearance sale, that overlooked Seward Park and that I hardly ever had a chance to lay in.

  Lately, whenever I looked out at the trees and the squirrels, I thought of Hillary. It wasn’t enough that we lived on Clinton Street, but our second-floor apartment overlooked Seward Park. Hillary had been telling donors that William Seward was her favorite secretary of state. “He was, after all, a senator from New York who ran for president, lost to an eloquent up-and-coming politician from Illinois and then surprised everyone by serving as his former rival’s secretary of state . . .”

  Bobby sat on the sofa.

  “Can’t we just go to brunch?” he said.

  I knew Bobby didn’t want to spin when he proposed brunch, a New York activity that for him ranks right above dragging an AC unit home from PC Richard.

  “We can go to brunch after!” I said.

  “I’ve never been spinning before,” Bobby said.

  “It’s so easy. I’ll show you how to set up the bike and everything.”

  “Okay,” he said, without turning around. “But I want to be in the back row.”

  We’d rented our cycling shoes and were heading into the studio when I looked at Twitter one last time before tuning out for a whole forty-five minutes. “Oh my God,” I said. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” People were staring. I’d stopped in the doorway and had caused a pileup of girls in sports bras.

  “What is it?” Bobby said, scooting me over a few inches. Our cycling shoes clinked.

  “Hillary passed out. She passed out. I’ve got to go. I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ll be great.”

  I kissed him and unvelcroed my shoes without sitting down. As I raced out of the studio, the redhead behind the counter, who heard my breakdown, yelled, “We’ve got some zinc pills here if your friend Hillary needs them.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “She’s good!”

  But my friend Hillary was anything but good. I sat on a bench at Astor Place and watched and rewatched the video a passerby shot of Hillary’s legs giving out, her limp body being hoisted into her Scooby van. It looked like one of those “Hillary’s health” hoax videos assembled in Matt Drudge’s basement. I ran the footage by Hired Gun Guy to make sure it wasn’t fake. Half of me hoped that it was.

  Brown Loafers, after not confirming whether Hillary had even left the memorial, put out a statement saying she “felt overheated so departed to go to her daughter’s apartment and is feeling much better.” It wasn’t his fault. Hillary only told Huma and Cheryl about the pneumonia diagnosis she got on Friday.

  Hillary was on her way to Chelsea’s apartment in the Flatiron District when the unsolicited texts from sources started flooding in.

  #1: Where does the person go who has been shot in the robbery? Never to the hospital.

  #2: This is a disaster.

  #3: She said she was fine and was hiding her true health.

  #4: Heard SS made her wear heavy body armor . . .

  . . . and, later that afternoon from my mom:

  #5: I hope Hillary didn’t give you pneumonia!

  David Axelrod tweeted the primo question: “Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”

  Bobby walked out of the class like he’d spent the day horseback riding, his shirt glued to his chest.

  “Hi, how was it? I’m really sorry, but I’m on deadline now . . .”

  He sat on the bench next to me and took a long swig of water without speaking.

  “The good news is brunch is out,” I said.

  He took a couple more sips and, squinting into the traffic, said, “How’s Hillary?”

  45

  The Fall of Magical Thinking

  On board the campaign plane, September 2016

  The clementine crushed any hopes we had that the Stronger Together plane would lead to Hillary wandering back to schmooze with us.

  After a couple of unsuccessful tries, Ruby Cramer rolled the fruit up the aisle and into the front cabin. We’d written on its peel the question, “Would you rather have dinner with Trump or Putin?”

  The Travelers waited anxiously until the clementine came whirling back down with Putin circled. We tweeted out Hillary’s response. That’s when Brown Loafers came back and informed us the clementine had been “off the record.” He said he’d circled Putin, not Hillary. The debate went like this . . .

  “But you never said the orange was off the record!”

  “It’s a clementine,” Brown Loafers said.

  “You don’t have a case!”

  “Everyone is really tense,” Brown Loafers said, shaking his head.

  The campaign won. The embeds tweeted out a clarification: “HRC saw
the orange, noted she once dined w Putin, but did not issue an answer either way.”*

  On one stop, Hillary came to the back of the plane to prove how much she appreciated her young staffers. “How’s Arun treating you? Arun goes all the way back to the State Department with me, don’t you? How many years has it been, Arun?” Hillary said singling out our blushing, bushy-haired press wrangler who almost always wore a jacket and tie. We were all too polite to tell her his name was Varun.

  Hillary popped into the press cabin, freshly shellacked and ready to get the televised “I’m feeling GREAT” exchange over with.

  “Hi, guys! Welcome back to Stronger Together,” she said.

  Andrea Mitchell took the first stab: “How are you doing? How are you feeling?”

  “I am doing GREAT, thank you so much,” Hillary said.

  Imagine two cars stuck in third gear. Each is being pushed up opposite sides of a hill, but just before the drivers get to the top and can see each other, they keep sliding back down the hill. That’s what it’s like trying to make on-the-record small talk with Hillary.

  She promised us she’d take our questions after her speech in Greensboro, and when she started to turn away, a Traveler yelled, “What have you been doing for the last few days?”

  “Uh, um. I will talk about that later, too,” Hillary said, still on the move.

  I said the first thing that came to mind: “Did you binge-watch The Good Wife?”

  “It’s done. I am so sad. I really am. It’s really a loss,” Hillary said. She stopped and turned, lingering over the flash of cameras. “Madam Secretary, however, is coming back, so that’s something to look forward to.”

  “Is that odd to watch? It’s so meta,” I asked.

  “I actually get a big kick out of it,” Hillary said.

  “Yeah, I guess seeing Téa Leoni play you . . .” I said.

  “I watched it with a little bit of skepticism at first. But I got so into it. I really like the story lines. They have some good quasi-realistic story lines, so anyway . . .”

  “WHY NORTH CAROLINA?” a TV correspondent yelled.

  “Excited to get to North Carolina!” Hillary said. She gave a clumsy half thumbs-up and headed to the front cabin.

  “Bye . . .” a couple of us muttered.

  Looking out the window from the motorcade at the relaxed, abundantly green blur of Greensboro, North Carolina, I wanted to spend more than an hour there. But the days when we actually got to know a place ended a long time ago. The campaign was surgical at this point. Get in at this church in Durham or that community college in south Florida and get out.

  Hillary walked onto the stage to James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” with such aplomb that conspiracy theorists thought she had a body double. At the press conference following the rally, it was Hillary all right.

  I sat cross-legged on the wooden floor of the basketball court half listening. My deadline was approaching, and my editor emailed me, “I need a top . . .” which meant I had to at least get two hundred words to him. Hillary agreed to take questions mostly to prove how much “stamina” she had, but as soon as she exhaled and opened her three-ring folder on the podium in front of us, she seemed only half herself. She’d told the rally that the three days at home resting had been a “gift” that allowed her to “reconnect with what this whole campaign is about.”

  This reassured me since I still didn’t know what the campaign was about. The race was pretty much tied at this point. Outside, a cluster of protesters held handmade posters with the usual hillary for prison, plus a newer rallying cry, i am deplorable.

  Hillary spoke softly and with minimal animation. “I want to give Americans something to vote for, not just against,” she said. “I want to close my campaign focused on opportunities for kids and fairness for families. That’s been the cause of my life. It will be the passion of my presidency.”

  That sounded good, but Hillary must’ve still been on heavy medication if she thought she could make the rest of an election against Trump about the “detailed plans in thirty-eight different policy areas” that she’d laid out over the past year and a half. Instead, she would spend much of the fall deriding Trump for his fat shaming of a former Miss Universe and defending Rosie O’Donnell (“an accomplished actor”) and Kim Kardashian against Trump’s “pathetic” put-downs.

  Hillary got irritated with us even faster than usual.

  When the Travelers asked several times about why she hadn’t told Tim Kaine about her pneumonia diagnosis on Friday, and “what does that say about what your relationship would be like with him in the White House?” she said, “We communicated. We communicated, but I’m not going to go into our personal conversations.”

  Asked why it took so long for the press and the public to know, Hillary blamed Brooklyn. “My campaign has said that they could’ve been faster, and I agree with that. I certainly expect them to be as focused and quick as possible.” The only problem with that excuse, of course, was that her campaign didn’t know.

  Chuck Schumer, who’d been next to Hillary at the September 11 memorial service, later said he’d had pneumonia, too. The virus became a status symbol of physical proximity to the next president. Carolyn joked, “Did you see that Jennifer Granholm and Chris Quinn infected themselves with pneumonia bacteria so they can announce they have it like Schumer did?”

  Like most of the press, I considered Hillary’s handling of her pneumonia and what it said about her psychology more of a story than any actual health problems. She was sixty-eight, and we could hardly keep up with her ourselves. But going back to the Guernica press conference, the biggest fuckups of Hillary’s campaign were always because of her time-warp syndrome. Hillary had the 1990s in mind when she told only Cheryl and Huma about her pneumonia diagnosis.

  After the September 11 memorial, in the van on the way to Chelsea’s apartment, Huma said to Hillary, “How does the statement about dehydration square with the pneumonia diagnosis?” The rest of the aides in the van looked at each other. Uh, what pneumonia diagnosis?

  During the 2008 primary, whenever critics would accuse Hillary of living in the past, she’d say, “What part of the 1990s didn’t they like—the peace or the prosperity?” She didn’t talk about the ’90s much in 2016, but everything, from her rallies to TV ads and piles of opposition research and how she handled the pneumonia, came out of the 1992 playbook. Cheryl and Huma, who were with her in the White House, appreciated her “zone of privacy.” They’d lived through Whitewater and Travelgate and all the other gates James Carville loved to recite on cable news. Disclosure didn’t ever help matters.

  Brooklyn often suggested that Hillary try to break out of the ’90s mind-set. Play to her strengths and cut back on the traditional rallies. Her pint-size crowds compared to Trump’s only fed reporters’ reductionist theories about Enthusiasm anyway. She could do town halls and impromptu stops, aides suggested. Like the time she walked into a Girl Scouts office in Ashland, Kentucky. “I loved being a Girl Scout. I was a Brownie first, then I was a Girl Scout, then I was something called a Mariner Scout when I was in high school,” she told the little girls who gathered around in their green and brown patch-covered sashes.

  Hillary seemed more at ease, less scripted in these settings, and they always got picked up on the news the same way a rally or speech would, Brooklyn argued, but Huma always insisted that they keep it old school: big (or biggish) rallies, TV ads, and, above all else, debate prep.

  Hillary even rehearsed how to create a prime-time TV moment, like the one her husband had in a 1992 debate when George H. W. Bush checked his watch as Bill had a heartfelt exchange with a woman about the down economy. Hillary would take a couple of steps toward the questioner, make eye contact, empathize. Again, Hillary cut back on her campaign schedule and spent most days preparing for the debate in a conference room at the Doral Arrowwood Resort in Rye Brook.

  Thursday, 9/22—HRC has no public events scheduled.

  Friday, 9/23—HRC ha
s no public events scheduled.

  Saturday, 9/24—HRC will attend the Opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

  Sunday, 9/25—HRC has no public events scheduled.

  Monday, 9/26—HRC will participate in the Presidential Debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY.

  I’d been at the office the day Hillary came to the belly of the beast, the New York Times Building, to meet with the editorial board. After about an hour of policy talk, Carolyn tried to show Hillary the Times’ latest technological innovation, a 360-degree video camera. A couple of weeks earlier, after Trump met with the editorial board (when he said his proposed border wall was “negotiable”), he’d delighted in the funky little multilens camera, peeking into its mirrored eye and asking how it works.

  Hillary looked at Carolyn as if she’d tried to hand her a ticking blob of C-4. She took a couple of steps back and called out for her team. “Uh, um, Jen! Jen! Can you take a look at this?” Then Hillary turned to Carolyn, the editor who oversees the Times’ political coverage, and said, “You need to talk to my team about that.”

  Hillary always used debate-prep sessions as cathartic exercises. Before the “you’re likable enough” debate in New Hampshire in 2008, Hillary had lost it. She kicked everyone out of the room and sipped hot tea with Chelsea. Aides understood that in order to keep it all together onstage, Hillary sometimes needed to unleash on them in private. “You want authentic, here it is!” she’d yelled in one 2016 prep session, followed by a fuck-laced fusillade about what a “disgusting” human being Trump was and how he didn’t deserve to even be in the arena.

  The Times devoted at least a week’s worth of energy into trying to figure out who would play Trump in debate prep. My unsubstantiated guesses had included Andrew Cuomo (“It has to be someone Hillary genuinely hates,” I’d argued) or Terry McAuliffe. I felt like an idiot when Maggie Haberman broke that they’d tapped Original Guy, who later told Annie Karni that he got off his meds for the occasion. Hmmm, wherever will Hillary find a manipulative, sometimes-charming, often hilarious, possible sociopath? Hillary also relied on Ron Klain, a Biden loyalist who had prepped Bill for the I-feel-your-pain moment in 1992.