Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary

AT THE STEAK fry, Iowa Hillary—the most belabored of all the versions of Hillary I’d mentally characterized—delivered an unintentionally ominous “Hello, Iowa, I’m baaaaaaaack.” She cracked a joke about Bill’s vegan diet. “It does really feel just like yesterday when I was last here at the Harkin Steak Fry, or as my husband now prefers to call it, the stir-fry,” drawing some giggles from the leery crowd of party faithful.

She then embarked on fifteen minutes of vanilla remarks. “In Washington, there’s too little cooperation and too much conflict …” she said, in what, even for Hillary, ranked high in the pantheon of pabulum political talk. This was when Bernie Sanders was still an obscure socialist senator from Vermont, and Hillary’s aides had urged her to take out any references to raising the minimum wage, advising that “this might still be too hot and partisan and might prefer just saying ‘We have a choice whether to move forward …’”

Bill sat behind her, his mouth newly flopped open in a way that made people assume he was older and sicker than he actually was. He wore a red-and-white gingham print button-down shirt, a recent birthday present from Hillary. “It kinda makes me feel like a tablecloth at a diner,” he told us.

When Hillary finished, Tom Harkin took the podium and in nine folksy words stroked Bill’s fragile ego and undermined Hillary in a scene that stayed with me for the rest of the campaign. “We saved the best for last, didn’t we, folks?” Harkin said. Chants of “Bill!” echoed over the grassy field.

As both Clintons headed back to their SUV and an accompanying eleven-car motorcade, a handful of young Latino immigrants, whose numbers had swelled since 2008, shouted out to Hillary about whether she agreed with Obama’s mass deportations. Would she deport their families, too? She shoved a thumbs-up their way and said, “Yaaaay!”

Salon called the event THE DUMB IOWA STEAK FRY: AN OMEN FOR THE HORRIBLY DULL POLITICAL YEAR TO COME. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said of the footage of Hillary flipping steaks with a forced grin, “Hillary Clinton’s problem for people that know her and like her—like I know her and like her—she puts on that political hat, and then she’s a robot.”

WHEN I GOT back to Des Moines that night, I grabbed a seat at Centro at the end of a long table next to Hillary’s faith adviser, a blubbery, histrionic man. We called him Hands Across America (HAA) because he’d traveled the country with us in 2008 after a sexual harassment allegation led to his brief banishment from the Hillary campaign’s Virginia headquarters. A young staffer said he planted a wet, unwanted kiss on her head. (The staffer was transferred to a different department.)

After that, HAA ran an outside group that supported Hillary’s 2016 bid, using his position to regularly feel up several of the young women who worked for him in hopes of landing a job on the campaign. He would be frozen out of the official 2016 campaign team.

HAA exhibited generally creepy behavior, but seemed more pitiful and effeminate than threatening, which is why I tried to ignore his rubbing up and down my back at the steak fry as we posed for a selfie that I posted on Instagram as if we were old friends. I once had a meeting in DC with HAA and a family friend of Hillary’s who had the porcelain smile and abundant black lashes of a daytime TV host. HAA rubbed his hands together and said in his Southern drawl, “Ay just luv my job. I get to be in a locked office with all y’all pretty, young girls.” Hillary would sometimes mention him on the campaign trail, referring to her “friend” who “sends me scripture and devotionals, sometimes mini-sermons every day,” always leaving out the small detail that everyone suspected he was a pervert.

As I took my seat next to HAA I tried to ignore this detail, too, because that’s what political reporters do when we are in Iowa. We write identical stories and suck up to drunk, lecherous sources at Centro.

HAA massaged my shoulder with one hand and drank a whiskey on the rocks with the other. I put a couple of the fried brussels sprouts with ranch dressing on my plate and sat there without speaking, attempting to contort my face into the expression I thought an unbothered male reporter would make.

The other reporters grilled HAA about when Hillary might declare and whether she would even have a primary opponent. He pretended, like everyone on the unofficial payroll then, that she hadn’t made up her mind.

“Now, c’mon y’all, give her the space to make up her mind. She wants to take her time, do it right this time. I sent her a scripture this morning that said …”

I felt his hand move down my back.

“I’m not feeling great, I think I’m going to head back to the Marriott,” I said, jumping up.

“No, Ames, now c’mon, you just got here,” HAA said, tugging on the arm of my blazer.

I dug around in my backpack and pulled out all the cash I had, eleven dollars, and tossed it in the middle of the table.

Carolyn couldn’t get me combat pay, but she must’ve known I was about to crack because she agreed to put me on the cushiest assignment in journalism as a reward after a bruising year in Hillaryville: babysitting the Obamas on their annual Hawaiian vacation.

By my third day at the Moana Surfrider hotel in Honolulu, I had the timing down. I’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. in my corner room of the old side of the hotel, overlooking Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head, and check in with my editors in Washington. I’d file the first draft of the “setup story” with any anticipated news (e.g., POTUS’s statement about the North Korean hack on Sony; his planned visit to a mess hall at the Marine Corps Base) around 7:00 a.m. This is all Hawaii-Aleutian time. Then I’d head downstairs to find a spot on Waikiki Beach close enough to where the waves broke so that the sound of the saltwater drowned out passing tourists, but far enough from the shoreline that the late-afternoon tide wouldn’t sweep up my laptop and reporter’s notebooks and Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes , the 1,072-page tome on the 1988 election that I was determined to get through before the 2016 campaign started, even if it meant skipping the Gephardt chapters.

There were only a couple weeks left of 2014. Almost a year had passed since “Planet Hillary” made me persona non grata, and even some of the Poseurs were speaking to me again. Six months had gone by since the DC confrontation and nothing made Carolyn happier than strutting into the daily morning meeting with the Times ’ top editors and fighting to get my stories on the front page.

I’d learned not to rely on The Guys. I’d cultivated a variety of sources that ranged from one of Bill Clinton’s kindergarten friends to a State Department official turned Wall Street executive. Sourcing up usually involved a friendly off-the-record breakfast (I stopped doing dinners after the “inside you” incident). A morally ambiguous donor and former aide always insisted we meet at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in Midtown Manhattan under the gilded Parrish mural of merry Old King Cole surrounded by his obsequious court of knights, musicians, and servants. I always wanted a shower after.

The Times ’ new executive editor, Dean Baquet, gave me his full support as Jill had. Dean is from New Orleans and wore black suits with red pocket squares and rimless glasses. He called me “kiddo” and loved to gossip about Little Rock and Juanita’s, the Tex-Mex restaurant where he met sources when he was a Los Angeles Times reporter looking into Hillary’s commodity trades. Because of this early stint in Arkansas, Dean, along with Carolyn, succeeded Jill and Howell Raines as the latest embodiment of the Clintons’ theory that the Times had it out for them.