Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  Hillary reminded the audience that LeBron James had endorsed her. “Now, I may become president, but he will be king of Ohio for as long as there is a king,” she said.

  Dozens of empty chairs sat in the press area. Extension cords dangled unused off folding tables. Cherry pickers set up to give photographers an aerial shot of Hillary sat idle. I had to remind myself that there was a time, during the Harkin Steak Fry, before Hillary was a candidate and while Trump was still a reality TV star, when she had been the media’s obsession. Two hundred reporters had stampeded across the lawn for a glimpse of the most irresistible, dramatic story of the “horribly dull political year to come.” Hillary, the would-be candidate able to capture the world’s attention with a single flip of sirloin, now hardly registered.

  Pretty soon we were calling it Hillary’s Death March to Victory. I don’t know how else to explain it except to say that it didn’t feel like a winning campaign. Hillary went through the motions.

  “Hello [insert swing-state city here]!”

  Eight years earlier, I’d experienced an actual winning campaign, and not just some winning reelection campaign, but a spectacular, holy-shit-America-is-going-to-elect-a-black-man winning campaign. I saw the euphoria—the millions who never thought elections mattered to them, standing in line for hours just to get a glimpse. You never get used to seeing a crowd of a million people. Every time we walked into a rally, in stadiums mostly, my jaw would drop. Obama must’ve felt the same because he never wanted to get off the damn stage. He’d look out at the crowds, the hope signs, the tears in people’s eyes. He’d ramble on for fifteen or twenty minutes, interrupted with frequent shouts of “I love you,” and his cool, “I love you back.” He knew that was the best it would ever get.

  Hillary’s campaign did not feel like that. In fact, if there was a single unifying force behind her candidacy, it was her obvious desire to get the whole thing over with. “This election is ten days away,” she said at a rally in Des Moines. “Eleven, but we’re more than halfway through today.”

  Aside from the local touches, each speech, crowd, city blurred into one. The women, mostly boomers, who wore nasty women for hillary buttons. The senior citizens who sat in folding chairs to one side of the stage, their walkers or canes resting nearby. The gay men who had blue H’s painted on their cheeks. The love trumps hate signs—even her catchiest slogan was about Trump. Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” filling the high school gyms with the scoreboards set to time: 2016, home: 45, away: 45. The “Lock Her Up!” protesters outside. The scent of the nearby porta-potties.

  The Travelers didn’t know if we were in Akron or Toledo, Cleveland or Cincinnati, Raleigh or Charlotte, so the press advance kids started to tape helpful reminders to our workspaces in each city.

  You are in Toledo, Ohio, for a Secretary Hillary Clinton Economic Speech at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza on Monday, October 3, 2016.

  “Did you see the last debate?!” had replaced “Deal me IN!” as Hillary’s favorite line.

  She was so far ahead in the polls after the third debate that I wrote lines like “Mrs. Clinton is likely to prevail against Mr. Trump in two weeks,” and “Mr. Trump’s party increasingly concedes he is unlikely to recover in the polls.”

  Brooklyn was so cocksure that they turned to Senate and congressional races. The campaign, flush with $153 million in cash, spent $1 million on voter turnout in Indiana and Missouri. Robby vowed to “dramatically” expand efforts in Arizona, spending an additional $2 million on advertising and sending their most valuable (and reluctant) campaigner, Michelle Obama, there. The campaign bought ads in Texas and Utah. Organizers in Michigan and Wisconsin still pleaded for resources, but Robby saw opportunities to “expand the map” and “make sure Democrats controlled the Senate.”

  This new mission made Hillary’s stump speech even more stilted. In Lake Worth, Florida, the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to Hillary, who turned sixty-nine that day. “Thank you so much for singing to me,” she said. “I hope that one of the best gifts that you can give yourselves would be sending Patrick Murphy to the United States Senate.”

  Adding to the gloom of superiority in the campaign was the angst about WikiLeaks’ daily release of more #PodestaEmails. Each dump brought fresh conspiracies, including right-wing theories that a reference to “Madre” in one email (“please don’t burn the source or Madre may pay the price”) was a code name for a secret CNN source trying to help Hillary. In reality, Madre is one of The Guys’ pit bull rescues.

  With weeks left, I was dying to spend as much time as possible on the road, but the email dumps often tethered me to my desk. I’d been on my way to the White Plains airport to fly to North Carolina, where Hillary and Michelle Obama would have their first and only joint rally, only to be summoned back to the newsroom by my editors to read through a new pile of emails related to the Clinton Foundation.

  This election isn’t happening in my cubicle.

  I traveled on weekends, holidays. I went to a black church in Charlotte with Hillary on Rosh Hashanah. I’d had to scramble to find the Times editors on “goy duty.”

  You are in Cincinnati, Ohio, for a rally with Secretary Clinton at Smale Riverfront Park on Monday, October 31, 2016. Note: Happy Halloween!

  Early one Sunday morning, the Travelers, who’d spent the night at a Marriott in a research park in Durham, North Carolina, rode over to Hillary’s hotel, a luxury spa with Zen gardens and outdoor fire pits overlooking a thick forest of Carolina hemlocks and magenta rhododendrons.

  We barreled into the earth-hued lobby spritzing ourselves with raspberry-scented lotion in the gift shop, digging underneath the suede chaise longue chairs for power outlets and generally destroying any shred of Zen that the hotel had once offered.

  “The Everydays don’t stay here.”

  “No, no they do not.”

  “Look! Is that free coffee?”

  From there we went to a black church in Durham (This is the day the Lord hath made . . . ) followed by a couple early-voting rallies. We got back to Westchester after 10:00 p.m. I hadn’t written a single word, but I did take a stab at TLC’s “Waterfalls” on a karaoke machine a photographer had set up on the plane.

  Thanks to Hillary’s celebrity endorsements, the Travelers spent almost every night at a free concert—Katy Perry (Philly), Adele (Miami), Elton John (New York), J.Lo and Marc Anthony (Miami), Chance the Rapper, Jay-Z and Beyoncé plus backup dancers in blue pantsuits (Cleveland).

  The wire reporters sat staring into the glowing eyes of their laptops during the Beyoncé–Jay-Z concert. In khaki pants and sweater sets, these DC reporters looked about as incongruous in the jubilant almost entirely black audience as Mike Schmidt waddling onto Waikiki Beach. Annie and I stood up and danced. I was anticipating the unflattering photo and the Breitbart headline Fawning Press Goes Wild for Hillary in Cleveland, but I didn’t care.

  And when Beyoncé displayed, in a multimedia explosion of hip-hop and girl power, the phrase that twenty-four years earlier had cast Hillary as Lady Macbeth and an affront to stay-at-home moms, I even choked up. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession,” flashed on the screen. Signed, “Hillary Clinton.”

  It was a major milestone. Maybe Hillary really would win. Of course, when I asked Jen if that meant Hillary had reclaimed the cookies comment, for which she spent twenty years apologizing, Jen said Beyoncé had creative control and Hillary hadn’t known about it. “Yeah, that was, uh, interesting,” Jen said.

  I looked around at the thousands of pumped young voters who poured out of the Cleveland arena. They didn’t look anything like Hillary’s usual crowds. For a second, I thought they’d deliver Ohio. But then I thought back to Iowa and the Demi Lovato concert and what Pete D’Alessandro had said: They just came for the ribs.

  In the final weeks, I went on the road even though I knew it meant I’d miss out on bylines. In me
eting after meeting, on daily 8:00 a.m. conference calls, colleagues who covered Trump explained that there was no chance in hell he could win. I agreed, thinking this was just how Hillary would win, the long-suffering feminist heroine who would make history not in a festooned lovefest but in a dreary, mechanical slog.

  Robby had just done a conference call with donors, telling them Hillary was up by seven points in Michigan, twenty points in Wisconsin, with 10 percent of the early vote tallied. Hispanic turnout was up 139 percent in Florida. She’d win North Carolina by three or four points. “Comey did not change the fundamentals of the race. We saw tightening before Comey, and there’s no dramatic shift in our polling,” he said. “It’s the tightening of the GOP coming home.”

  Hillary joined the call. “We know Arizona is a stretch,” she said, noting that she had sixteen thousand people at her rally in Phoenix. “We’re doing all we can to turn it blue.”

  It wasn’t mathematically possible that Trump could win, and yet I still couldn’t kick the feeling that Hillary wouldn’t win either.

  You are in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a Secretary Hillary Clinton Democratic Organizing Event at the Great Hall at Heinz Field. It is Friday, November 4, 2016.

  In Pittsburgh, the Travelers had the run of Heinz Field while Hillary and Mark Cuban (she loved having her own bombastic billionaire turned reality TV star along) held a rally in an indoor pavilion lined with Steelers memorabilia. It was wonderful to be outside, not stuck on a bus or in a high school gym on a sunny, sixty-five-degree fall day. We raced out of breath to the fifty-yard line. It was just ten of us, the ones who’d covered Hillary the longest. We looked out at the sun refracting off sixty-eight thousand empty orange seats. “Classic HRC rally crowd,” Annie said. “Just kidding. Just kidding.”

  The front sanctum of the Stronger Together plane started to look like Hillary’s West Wing—longtime friends, the loyalest of the loyalists, rejoined the entourage, including Cheryl Mills, Maggie Williams, Capricia Marshall, Huma (back from a brief banishment in Brooklyn), and OG, who’d been mostly kept in his padded room (or DC office) during the campaign. “Capricia Marshall, will you please report to the principal’s office?” one of The Guys said into the intercom, summoning her to Hillary’s chambers.

  For all the talk early on of bringing in fresh talent to run her campaign team, Hillary would end it with the same box of broken toys who’d enabled all her worst instincts since the ’90s. I emailed Carolyn, “I’m waiting for Sid Blumenthal to join us.”

  In 2015, before she started her campaign, Hillary talked to aides about what she called her “Al Gore problem.” If she was going to be herself, substantive, prepared, prone to policy talk, she knew she’d also come off as stiff, a square. In these final weeks, she finally seemed at peace with that.

  She did a whole riff on making lists. “I have a plan for just about everything . . . You know, maybe this is a woman thing. We make lists, right? I love making lists. And then I love crossing things off!” She’d build “Get Out the Vote” rallies around her college calculator. (“You can actually go to hillaryclinton.com/calculator to see how much money you and your family could save with our plan.”) Speaking to college students, she’d give them “a little homework assignment.” (“If you add up the number of jobs that our economy added when Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were president and if you compare it with the two Bush presidencies and the Reagan presidency, you’ll see what I mean.”)

  In Grand Rapids, Hillary led a call-and-response about interest rates. “There are so many people paying eight, ten, twelve, higher. Now where did that—how much?” She cupped her ear to hear a few numeric shouts from the crowd. “Twelve-point-seven percent! Fourteen-point-one percent? I gotta tell you, that is outrageous.”

  She kept making references to Hamilton, even though tickets to the Broadway hit would’ve been prohibitively expensive for most Everydays. “Wow, I’ll tell ya, I’ve seen it three times and I listen to the score all the time,” Hillary told a crowd at an outdoor rally in Charlotte.

  I lifted the right side of Peter Nicholas’s noise-canceling earmuffs and said, “It didn’t end well for Hamilton.”

  But more than any data or talk about Democrats retaking the Senate, I knew Hillary thought she’d be president when she brought back the 3-D printer. “I am not one of those folks who think, ‘Well, we just can’t make it in America anymore’ . . . We can lead the world in precision machining, in 3-D printing!”

  She almost only did call-in interviews with black and Hispanic radio shows, and she even resisted doing those. She seemed uninterested, botching the softest of softballs. Hillary told DJ Envy of The Breakfast Club that she loved to dance, “and so any chance I get, I will dance. I’m not sure that it would be anything that you’d be saying was good dancing but—”

  “You don’t do the robot and stuff like that?” DJ Envy asked.

  “No, I’m not a robot—I don’t do that robot stuff, yeah.”

  When Sam Sylk, another black radio jockey, welcomed Hillary and said, “Yeah, I’m pumped up on why to vote,” Hillary laughed and said, “Well, that makes one of us.”

  “Yeah, makes one of us, huh? Okay.”

  She did so many radio call-ins that I asked Brown Loafers if Hillary would call into Michael Barbaro’s new podcast, The Run-Up. “The New York Times podcast audience isn’t our target demographic,” he replied.

  Usually by the final stretch, candidate reporters are so brainwashed from living in the bubble that we all believe our horse will win even if the facts say otherwise. Think about it: For months, years sometimes, we’ve only talked to die-hard supporters. We’ve only heard spin from one side. We’ve been at hundreds of rallies where the only voters we see want our assigned candidate to win. Traveling in the motorcade means the campaign rushes us past the occasional protesters, a passing glare that has faded by the time we’re captive on the bus again.

  Romney’s traveling press fell for it hard in 2012; so did the McCain-Palin reporters in 2008. In the waning weeks of the 2008 primary fight against Obama, when Hillary added more events to her already packed schedule and party leaders urged her to drop out, I still believed she had a chance. You just don’t understand; the polls don’t see what I see.

  In 2016, the opposite happened. The Hillary press and the Trump press both thought we were the sad sacks doomed to cover the losing candidate.

  52

  The Tick-Tock Number One

  November 7, 2016

  11:10 a.m.

  Traveling press and pool wheels down Pittsburgh International Airport Atlantic Aviation FBO.

  I had my ideal aisle seat for the final leg—in the second row of the press cabin next to Annie in the middle seat and Ruby at the window. Varun (or Arun, as we all called him after Hillary’s flub), who assigned us our seats, had come through. Either that or he just didn’t want to deal with my diva fit if I hadn’t gotten the aisle. We loaded off the plane at our first stop, suddenly aware of where we’d landed and how strange it was, given that Hillary was so far ahead in Pennsylvania.

  “Does anyone know why we’re back in Pittsburgh?” a Traveler asked.

  “Yeah, weren’t we, like, just here like two days ago?”

  “. . . and in Philly yesterday?”

  “Yeah, why couldn’t we have like stayed in Philly and gone straight to Pittsburgh?”

  On Sunday, we’d gone to the Mt. Airy Church of God in Christ in Philly where backstage Hillary and the gospel singer BeBe Winans belted out “Amazing Grace” so loudly that her voice echoed through the closed doors.

  I remembered what Robby said the other day, about how the campaign’s analytics showed Hillary would do better in the Philly suburbs than any Democrat had in decades.

  “Turnout, obvs,” I told the Travelers. I work for the New York Times, I’m Number One.

  “Yeah,” they agreed.

  “She wants to kill him in Pennsylvania.”

  1:05 p.m.

  You are in Pittsbu
rgh, Pennsylvania, for a Secretary Hillary Clinton Get Out the Vote event at the University of Pittsburgh on Monday, November 7, 2016.

  For months, Hillary had been telling voters that what the country really needed—in addition to a $275 billion infrastructure plan and a revised corporate tax code—was more “love and kindness.” But there’d been little of either this election year. She’d spent the past several months pillorying Trump as “unfit” and “dangerous,” a “loose cannon” and a “puppet.” I thought back to the day before the 2008 election when I was the pool reporter in Obama’s motorcade riding over to Grant Park after the results came in, and how optimistic the country felt then. David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, summed up 2016 as, “Hope and change, not so much. More like hate and castrate.”

  Now, with hours left before the polls opened, Hillary stopped making it all about Trump. “I’m here to ask you to vote for yourselves, vote for your families, vote for your futures, vote on the issues that matter to you because they are on the ballot, not just my name and my opponent’s name.”

  “I love you!” a group of young girls shouted in unison.

  It wasn’t that, in Hillary’s 575 days on the campaign trail, adoring fans hadn’t professed their love for her. They had. But in Pittsburgh, Hillary looked as though she finally believed them. She paused, tilted her head to the right, and looked at the girls. Abandoning the teleprompter, she said, “I love you all, too.”

  5:05 p.m.

  You are in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a Secretary Hillary Clinton Get Out the Vote rally at Grand Valley State University Fieldhouse. It is Monday, November 7, 2016.

  “LOADING!” a press aide yelled. Hillary had just wrapped up her second and final rally in Michigan since she lost to Bernie back in March. Two rallies down, three more stops to go.