Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary

But the biggest precampaign schmooze fest was the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York in September (on my birthday, to be exact), the Davos-like gathering that matches wealthy donors with worthy causes. Because this would be the last CGI before Hillary became a presidential candidate, the press shop had assigned handlers to escort reporters everywhere, lest we run into a donor who went off message. The theme that year was “Reimagining Impact,” not to be confused with 2013’s “Mobilizing for Impact” or 2012’s “Designing for Impact.” There was a lot of impact happening at CGI.

I wrote a brief blog post about the young press minder (an intern, I later learned) who had followed me into the restroom. When I asked one of The Guys for comment, he sent me a press release about American Standard’s “Flush for Good” campaign to improve sanitation for three million people in the developing world. “Since you’re so interested in the bathrooms and CGI,” he said.

It was worse than the Yorkie. It was worse than anything else I would publish for the next three years.

I’d written the potty-minder post as a brief, breezy CGI scene-setter, not a serious commentary on relations between the Clintons and the media. But that’s not how the wider world saw things. The Washington Post published a column THE CLINTON TEAM IS FOLLOWING REPORTERS TO THE BATHROOM: HERE’S WHY THAT MATTERS. The Free Beacon called for one of The Guys, ironically the most decent and professional of the cohort, to “stick his big obnoxious head in the toilet and ‘Flush for Good.’” That didn’t help matters. Until then, I hadn’t fully grasped the impact of a Times story in the viral news era. Bathroomgate was discussed on the Today show, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and ad nauseam on Twitter. I declined every interview request. I just wanted it to go away.

By the time Bill stepped off the stage after CGI’s closing plenary session (called “Aiming for the Moon and Beyond” because he spoke via a satellite link to a couple NASA astronauts who appeared, weightless, on board the International Space Station), the only story out of CGI anyone was talking about was the bathroom incident. “Goddammit, we’re trying to save the world and all these people can talk about is the goddamn bathroom,” was how one person summed up Bill’s backstage reaction.

Hillary’s expletive-laced response was worse. She told The Guys she’d held out hope I might still treat her fairly, but she’d given up on me after the bathroom post. “To be very honest, this episode was upsetting to people, not least of which the foundation team,” Brown Loafers said.

The Guys told me the post and a subsequent selfie I’d tweeted with a different press minder had “humiliated” a young intern. I felt awful about the whole thing. I hadn’t identified the intern and didn’t know her name. I had a handwritten apology note, but The Guys (who demanded I apologize) wouldn’t tell me where to send it. I could handle another fight with The Guys, but the last thing I wanted was for some hardworking kid to be inadvertently swept up in my media shit storm.

After that, The Guys and I tried to avoid one another. They’d ask if I was working with any (preferably male) colleagues or researchers and said they would “gladly” talk to them instead. Of all The Guys, Outsider Guy, who a couple years back had fought to get me access and unleashed on Ugandan military officials who wouldn’t allow me (a “cockroach reporter”) into a Clinton Foundation event, had become the most venomous. Maybe because he knew me the best, ever since Iowa and the time we’d shadowed Bill and Chelsea shaking hands and stirring up mayhem in Las Vegas casinos ahead of the 2008 Nevada caucuses, Outsider Guy also knew how to wound me more permanently than the others. The things he said stuck with me as I morphed, in his eyes and occasionally my own, from ally to cockroach.

On a story about Martin Scorsese killing an HBO documentary on Bill Clinton’s life after Chelsea had allegedly requested final cut, Outsider Guy would deal only with Michael Cieply, my coauthor in Hollywood and a grizzled industry veteran. “It’s hard for me to believe you deal with them for a living,” Cieply said, adding that his brief conversation with Outsider Guy had been the nastiest exchange of a career that had included getting yelled at by Harvey Weinstein and several studio executives sniffing coke off conference tables.

I tried to give The Guys a taste of their own medicine.

One night, at a cocktail party in the West Village townhouse of a former White House aide, a pile of Clinton hands, old and new, talked about the recent news that Robert Gibbs would leave his role as Obama’s White House press secretary to be the top corporate flack at McDonald’s.

“You couldn’t pay me enough,” one of The Guys said.

“I’d rather work for big tobacco. Seems more honest,” a White House aide turned Wall Street executive agreed.

I was in a debate with The Guys about a page-one feature set for the weekend paper. I explained that this would be a heartfelt portrait of Hillary’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, and how her childhood struggles would form the emotional core of her daughter’s 2016 campaign.

“Really? There’s nothing else I should know?” Hired Gun Guy said. “You always find a way to include some kind of dig …”

“You’re serious? You think I’m going to take a dig at her dead mother?”

“I don’t know,” he said, lifting his shoulders a couple of inches and pushing his open-palmed hands out in a cartoonish shrug.

“You know,” I said, taking a sip of rosé and cutting him off, “best case scenario, this all ends with a job at McDonald’s.”

“Secretary! Can you believe you’re back in Iowa?”

“Hillary! Does this mean you’re running?”

“Can you win here this time?”

Hillary stood in front of a Char-Griller, pretending to flip a steak at the Harkin Steak Fry in Iowa. It was the political event of the year for Democrats, Hillary’s first trip back to the state that had wrecked her 2008 presidential campaign, and the clearest public sign yet that she would run again. (For decades, the Harkin Steak Fry was the mandatory testing ground for would-be Democratic candidates.) I watched as she held the wooden handle of a spatula at a safe distance, as if a garden snake were coiled around the end. Then she gave the photographers a smile so open mouthed and amplified that, looking back on it, I should’ve seen it as a cry for help. The entire Democratic Establishment should’ve seen it. The image screamed all at once, How long do I have to act like I enjoy this shit? and Why the fuck am I back in this state? and Dear God, what am I doing? But what Hillary actually said to the press that afternoon was:

“It’s gurrrrate. It’s fabulous to be back. I love Iowa.”

I LOOKED AROUND the press scrum at the steak fry. We were all scrambling to write almost identical stories, using almost identical quotes and almost identical color (“She smiled in front of hay bales, an American flag and a John Deere tractor.”). The last time I’d been in Iowa with Hillary, I still felt like a foreign correspondent. Now, my journalism had become more like a feeding frenzy than a moveable feast.

I was no longer the kid who didn’t know any better than to stand up and cheer at a town hall. I’d become omnivorous, driven beyond all rationale by byline count and Twitter mentions. I lived in fear of being scooped over even the most insignificant minutia. Politico may have beaten me on the Ready for Hillary fund-raiser at the Standard Hotel in New York. But damn it, I heard the exclusive news that tickets cost $20.16 and that the signature cocktails included an eighteen-dollar gin-and-lime concoction called the Ultimate Ceiling Breaker. We were so starved for tiny morsels of news that I groveled with one of The Guys to use the names of his cats, Uday and Qusay (named after Saddam Hussein’s sons “because they were little terrorists”), in the “Planet Hillary” story. I was starting to see things—even how Hillary flipped a steak—with cynicism, and I feared the coming campaign would engulf what was left of my wide-eyed 2008 self.