Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary - Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns and One Intact Glass Ceiling

“Did we get a call time?”

“Not yet, but I heard 9, 9:30.”

“Thanks. I don’t want to miss the photo!”

“History!”

“Yes. Let’s hope she’s nice to us.”

For nineteen months, Hillary had tried her best to pretend a small army of print, TV, and wire reporters weren’t trailing her every move, but that morning she looked tickled to see us.

“Look at the big plane and the big press!” Hillary said, speaking in a baby voice as she stepped out of her black van the morning before Election Day. She was FaceTiming with her granddaughter, Charlotte, and turned her iPhone toward the Travelers as we all arranged ourselves by height in front of the Stronger Together plane.

“Wow! Look at this. Everybody is here,” Hillary said, as if we’d be anywhere else.

She spread her arms wide as if she might even embrace the entire mob. She did not. Barb, the campaign photographer, stood on a stepladder. I sat cross-legged on the far left-hand side, the same position I’d assumed on the final day of the 2008 election, when Barack Obama leapt into the middle of his traveling press corps and said, flashing his signature grin, “Say tequila!”

Barb instructed us all to scoot a little to the left or right and take off our sunglasses. The shutter had hardly fluttered when the mob disassembled and crushed Hillary with questions, rendering her a tiny red line in the middle of a voracious scrum. Surveying the scene, the most genial of The Guys, a preppy brunet with a student-body president’s grin who traveled everywhere Hillary went and who wore brown oxford loafers even in a New Hampshire blizzard, shook his head. “This is why we can’t have nice things,” he said.

“You’ve been often ahead of your time,” said a BBC correspondent, pushing her slender mic and soft question in Hillary’s face. “You’ve been sometimes misunderstood. You’ve fought off a lot of prejudice. Do you think that today America understands you and is ready to accept you?”

Hillary wasn’t about to fuck up hours before the polls opened by talking about sexism and her weird, complicated place in history. “Look, I think I have some work to do to bring the country together. As I’ve been saying in these speeches in the last few days, I really do want to be the president for everybody.”

Right before takeoff, an editor in New York called to check in, asking the question Times editors stuck in the newsroom always asked—“What’s the mood like there?”

“Hillary is orgasmically happy,” I said.

I regretted using such a sexual term to describe the woman who, in a matter of hours, would become the FWP, but I couldn’t describe her any other way. Through two presidential campaigns, I’d watched Hillary wear her disgust with the whole process—with us, with her campaign, with losing—on her face. The previous summer, I had posted a photo on social media of Hillary at a house party greeting supporters in Ottumwa, Iowa. Within seconds, someone commented, “She looks like she’d rather be at the dentist.”

But now Hillary’s expression said it had all been worth it. She wasn’t just about to become president. Hillary, who until Trump came along had been the most divisive figure in American politics for a couple of decades, was about to become the Great Unifier, relegating Trump and his bullying to the annals of reality TV. Her campaign aides in Brooklyn, all the data, and the early-vote returns assured her he couldn’t win.

“We think we’re going to do better in the Philly suburbs than any Democrat has in decades,” Robby Mook, Hillary’s chipper campaign manager, told us. “If we win Pennsylvania and Florida, he just has no path.” In other words, it’s over .

At the election-eve rally in Philadelphia with Bruce Springsteen, Hillary joined Obama onstage. He crouched down a little to kick a step stool closer to her podium. “When you’re president, it’s gonna be permanently there for you,” Obama whispered in her ear before kissing her cheek and exiting stage right.

Later that night, when we boarded the S.T. Express in Philly to fly to Raleigh-Durham for a final “Get Out the Vote” rally with Lady Gaga, the Travelers rushed to the front of the press cabin. We formed a human pyramid in the narrow opening where those of us who didn’t mind squatting on our knees and getting crushed by reporter limbs and camera lenses and dangling furry boom mics got a clear view of Bill and Hillary. They were cuddling.

The cynics will roll their eyes at this, but they weren’t there. Bill cupped Hillary’s shoulder with one of his long hands. He pulled her in tight, under his arm and into his chest, and not in the phony forced way political partners embrace for the cameras. That night, Bill looked at Hillary like she was the prom date he’d wooed all semester. He looked at her like she was the president.

Hillary squeezed him back with a look not of adoration but more like that of a mother trying to control a problem child. Bill glimpsed the press piled up, like coiled springs waiting to pounce. Seeing me scrunched in the bottom front, he said, “Oh, hi, Amy.” (Unlike Hillary, who had a gift for looking straight through me as if I were a piece of furniture, Bill always said hello.)

Asked about the significance of the evening, he said, “To finish here tonight I felt was important because that is where the country began.”

Then Bill Clinton did what he always did. He made the biggest night in Hillary’s life about himself. “It was interesting. You know, I sit on the board of the National Constitution Center …”

At that point, Hillary thrust her entire body toward the cockpit, the opposite direction from our scrum, dragging Bill, whose arm was still affixed tightly over her shoulder, With Her.

“Did he just say he was on the board of the National Constitution Center?” a wire reporter, to my right, asked.

“Yes, yes, he did,” I said.

“Classic.”

ONLY A HANDFUL of Travelers (the “tight pool” in Trailese), including the Wires, a print reporter from one local and one national newspaper, and a rotating TV crew that shared its footage with the rest of the pack, could fit inside the elementary school’s auditorium to watch Hillary vote the next morning. I’d spent the past week pleading with The Guys to let me be in the pool on Election Day. In 2008, by a stroke of dumb luck, I’d wound up in the pool in Chicago. I still have my notes: “7:36 a.m., Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Obama votes, Sasha and Malia with him.”

That night, I’d waited outside the Hilton as Obama and his family and closest aides watched the returns come in. I remember the corrugated metal arm of a loading dock pulling closed over an armored SUV and, like some magic trick, opening again seconds later with the country’s first black president-elect inside. From there we rode in the motorcade where 240,000 people waited in Grant Park.

“You have to let me. The Times is the local New York newspaper. The hometown paper always gets to be in the pool,” I begged one of The Guys, a slick newcomer and hired gun to Hillaryland, whom we thought of as the poor man’s Ben Affleck because he could’ve had Hollywood good looks if he didn’t spend most of his time like an overly made-up windup doll dispensing legalese about Hillary’s emails on cable news. Hired Gun Guy, who’d come up in New York politics, pointed out all the times he’d tried to get the Times to cover some small-ball press conference only to have us push back with “We are a global news organization, not some local paper.”

But my request worked its way up the ladder at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters and, figuring I couldn’t do too much damage at that point, they agreed.