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avanneman · 6 years

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Amy Chozick’s Chasing Hillary: You don’t have to be a pr*ck to work for the New York Times, or the Clinton campaign. But it helps! A LOT!

Newspaper reporters are not like you and me. They believe newspaper reporters are important.

That’s one of the takeaways from Timesgal Amy Chozick’s new opus, Chasing Hillary Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, a political campaign book with a difference, because it’s more about Amy than about Hillary, about how a compulsively over-achieving Texas Jew from the sticks fought her way up to the tippy-top of the journalistic food chain so that people could shit on her.

That’s Amy’s picture of life at the top: everybody hates you. Your “colleagues” try to undermine you, because they want all the good stories for themselves. Your “sources” try to crush your spirit, make you their bitch, so that you will write what they want you to write. People are always trying to “get in your head”—make you afraid, psych you out—but it’s also an accusation—“Are you getting in my head?” which is somehow seen as horrible, even though, as Amy tells it, that’s really the whole point of life in the Big City, to make others subservient to your will.

The “One Intact Glass Ceiling” line in the title (probably the publisher’s idea) has encouraged a number of ax-grinding reviewers to seize on Amy’s book as proof (as if they needed any proof) that the mainstream media were in the tank for Hillary. But they were just looking for a hook, an angle. Amy wanted Hillary to win, not because she liked her, but because the election of the first woman president would a Great Story, which Amy would write! And thus, in her own mind, become immortal.

The old-fashioned dream/fantasy of some reporters that, if the media reports "the truth" the people will make the "correct" decisions, in the voting booth and elsewhere, is largely absent from Amy's world. However, she does feel that she, and the rest of the media, were deeply "burned" by the Russian/WikiLeaks hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails. The hacking, not the DNC's inside gossip, should have been the story.

Although Amy tells us “no one else could fascinate and inspire and infuriate me all at the same time the way Hillary could,” I never got the feeling that that was true. Chozick seems to have no interest at all in Hillary’s “ideas”1—what she stands for—and thinks of her almost entirely as an awkward yet remarkable obsessive compulsive who has willed herself into the national spotlight out of sheer ambition (like Amy?), one who, moreover, deeply distrusts all reporters in general and hates Amy Chozick in particular.2

In fact, there’s plenty of reason for Clinton’s distrust, for, as Amy tells it, there’s nothing Amy likes more than embarrassing people, though she’s always bewildered when they resent it. One of her most favorite “scoops” occurred when she learned that the Clinton Foundation, to obtain Natalie Portman’s appearance at an international event, bought a first-class ticket, not just for Natalie, but for Natalie’s dog! For both Amy and her editor, Carolyn Ryan, the cream of the jest occurs later, when Republicans reference the ticket for Natalie’s Yorkie in a fund-raising pitch. Because that’s why Timesgals get up in the morning: so they can help Republicans raise cash.

In the real world, of course, the Clinton folks probably felt lucky to get Natalie for the price of a first-class plane ticket for her dog, instead of, you know, the price of a first class plane! “A big one—the kind you can stand up in. He has terrible claustrophobia.”

When Hillary 2016 was just a glimmer in someone’s eye, Amy wrote a cover story (a cover story!) for the New York Times Magazine, “Planet Hillary”, filled with both la-di-da graphics and zingers (many of which she recycled for this book), which began as follows:

“Hillary Clinton was nodding solemnly to the mother of a 9/11 victim when Huma Abedin, standing across the room, called out, “Let’s load!” to the staff members and bodyguards. The former secretary of state had yet to pick up her award from the Voices of September 11th, but her entourage was already preparing to shuttle her off to the next event, a benefit for God’s Love We Deliver, which was co-hosted by the designer Michael Kors and where she would sit next to the Vogue editor and former Obama bundler Anna Wintour.”3

So, to summarize: “Sure, 9/11 mothers are important, but we’re talking Anna Fucking Wintour here! Move your crab-ridden ass!”

In her story, Chozick organized dozens of Clinton folks into various categories, from “The Inner Circle” and “Chelsea Patrol” to “The White Boys” and “Poseurs”.4 For some reason, Team Hillary, aka “The Guys”, didn’t appreciate being held up to public ridicule in such a manner and demanded a meeting with Amy, who tells us that “I apologized. I said I’d try to do a better job next time and I’d be more careful moving forward. But that just pissed The Guys off more. The shrinking violet act and all.”

At the same time, Amy tells us that she feels she was set up, innocently reporting intramural backstabbing and payback as fact, which sounds sort of like, you know, bad reporting to me.

As you might guess from Amy’s opening paragraph, Amy likes to think of herself as an across the tracks gal, who had to fight her way up from nothing to make it in the Big Apple, her path blocked every step of the way by entitled Ivy League pricks and shits, but her specific motivation isn’t revealed until she goes to a Hillary rally at Washington Square (in New York City), where Hillary is passé and Bernie is le dernier cri:

“I dove into the crowd like an anthropologist, eager to understand why young women, in particular, weren’t With Her. But as I talked to so many students from NYU—and as their mouths moved and I followed up with “What’s your major?” and “How do you spell Delilah?”—I was secretly seething with resentment. I’d wanted to attend NYU ever since our seventh-grade Hobby Middle School trip to Washington and New York.”

But NYU cost $25,000 a year back then, so Amy has to settle for UT instead. But now, all of a sudden, confronting these Bernie chicks, she’s proud: “I looked at these twiggy, unshaven girls living in the West Village on their parents’ backs. … My envy began to fade. I’d been a brat.” Of course, she’d been living in Austin—which somehow manages to think of itself as cool—on her parents’ backs, with a ring in her nose—“a silver loop too big for my face that sat in a dollop of pink pus on my left nostril.” Well, you’re only young once, and she was saving her dad $21,000 a year.

Unlike conventional campaign books, which describe, you know, the campaign, Chasing Hillary is largely about Amy, about the frenzied, pointless exhaustion of covering a presidential campaign—driving down deserted roads at midnight during a blinding snowstorm to cover a meaningless speech in Wherethefuckarewe, Iowa, pigging out on junk food until your fat pants don’t fit you, wearing the same clothes for three days, losing any semblance of control over your Jewfro5—but it’s not all about her. Chozick has some shrewd things to say about Bill and Hillary—in particular, the extent to which they did sell out to Wall Street, for both political and personal reasons. She describes accompanying the Clintons on a philanthropic tour of Africa, staying at the Saxon Hotel in Johannesburg, once the palatial residence of South African billionaire Douw Steyn. Bill, naturally, has his own private luxury bungalow: “Yeah, I always feel slightly guilty staying over here,” Bill tells her. “But I get over it.” Hey, livin’ good and doin’ good. You can’t beat that!

In 2008, Amy caught Hillary saying some interesting things about NAFTA, which was still okay to like: “The benefits haven’t been uniformly distributed.” Unfortunately, she didn’t follow up on that. As Amy tells it, Team Hillary decided that they didn’t need angry white guys, even though, clearly, the electorate—a large chunk of it, anyway—was angry, as Hillary found out in the form of one Bernie Sanders. Chozick, because she didn’t trash Hillary 24/7, got a good taste of it in the form of endless emails from the Bernie Bros, ragin’ incels whose only form of sexual release seemed to come from calling women “cunts”.

Amy clearly believes that if Team Hillary had listened to Bill, with his old-fashioned ideas about going after working-class white voters, she would have won. I believe if she had used the State Department server, she would have won, comfortably. I also believe that if she had been a sensible secretary of state, persuading Obama not to invade Libya instead of invading it, she would have won going away. I also believe that if Obama had been more concerned with catering to the middle class, instead of pushing both for universal health care for the poor and entitlement cuts to please Wall Street, the ranks of Democratic governors and senators wouldn't have been decimated, giving Democrats more attractive candidates than an aging, battle-scarred figure loathed by many both on the right and on the left.

Chozick portrays Hillary as compulsive fund-raiser, even in the closing days of the campaign. Hanging out with the upper class at $10,000 a plate dinners is so much more relaxing than hand shakin’ and speechifyin’ with the many headed. She particularly puts a stick in Hillary for taking off most of the month of August to hang with her famous friends in the Hamptons, staying with Steven Spielberg and bringing Hillary’s two dogs along (“Masie, a curly-haired mutt, and Tally, a toy-poodle mix”), which strikes Amy as particularly over the top—“I mean, who brings their dogs?” Amy confesses that she herself and husband Bobby have taken an occasional weekend in the Hamptons as well, but I guess sans dogs, sometimes staying at “Daunt’s Albatross” (which definitely is cheap). “When the motel didn’t work out, we did what Bill, Hillary, and most of New York did: we mooched off rich friends.”

Well, in August 2016 Hillary and Bill did mooch, but in the past they rented their own place, but Amy still won’t give them a break. “Previous summers, when the Clintons rented their own beachside estates, Hillary’s brothers, Tony and Hugh, and the entire extended family showed up—the moochers of the moochers. (A grocer in East Hampton told me he saw Roger Clinton buying milk in a track suit).”

Bitchy much, girl friend? If the Clintons rented their own place, they weren’t moochers. If Amy’s sister stayed with her in New York, would she be a “moocher”? What is proper attire for buying milk in East Hampton, a blue blazer and white flannels? Or is the point that wide-assed hillbillies like Roger Clinton don’t belong in East Hampton in the first place?6 That’s the worst thing about snobbery: it’s catching.

Afterwords Ever industrious, and ever ingenious, Amy not only wrote a book recycling her coverage of Hillary, she wrote an article for the Times about writing the book: “How Does a Political Reporter Write a Memoir? First, Read Books. A Lot of Books.”. I confess that I haven’t read that article, but I have read her book, so I’ll offer a few suggestions for the second edition:

—Said of Carolyn Ryan: she “had New England newsprint in her blood.” The cliché that Amy’s groping for here of course is “printer’s ink”.

—“the youngest of two daughters.” Try “younger”.

—When Hillary gets pneumonia, according to Amy “the virus became a status symbol,” and quotes editor Carolyn as joking that people are infecting themselves with “pneumonia bacteria” to keep up. Props to Carolyn for knowing that pneumonia is caused by bacteria7 but none to Amy for not knowing that viruses and bacteria are not the same thing.

—Amy also talks about “pulsing” veins. I know that “vein” has traditionally been used to mean both arteries and veins, but it’s been almost four hundred years since William Harvey wrote On the Circulation of the Blood. Let’s get caught up.

—Amy repeatedly uses the word “suffragette”. Maybe this is second-wave feminism or whatever, but some gals prefer “suffragist”. Like “actor” instead of “actress”.

Amy shows a distinct lack of enthusiasm for dogs, which I am totally down with. I am known, in my building, as the grumpy old man who hates dogs.8 Which makes me wonder (though not really) why she made no mention of the fact that former NYT executive editor Jill Abramson celebrated her promotion by inaugurating a (long) series of columns about her dog “Scout”, which she then turned into a book, to which the Times devoted two highly favorable reviews!

Afterwords II, special nitpickers edition Like 99.07% of the population, Chozick says "lay" when purists like myself would say "lie"—as in "I'm going to lie down now." Almost 20 years ago I was reading a recipe online in the Times and came across the instruction to let two sheets of phyllo dough "lay open like the pages of a book". I immediately sent an email to the Times instructing them of their error and got a response thanking me for "holding us to our high standards" about 45 minutes later. Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I haven't seen them make that mistake again.

There is no mention in this book of Clinton’s record either as a senator or as secretary of state, nor of any of Clinton’s policy proposals made during the 2016 campaign. Chozick defines "news" as whatever it is people want to talk about and is scornful of reporters who want to explore the issues in-depth. ↩︎

Hillary told people who “knew her when” not to talk to Amy because Amy hated her. ↩︎

Additional zingers: “It was just another hectic fall evening in Manhattan for Clinton, and she was keeping herself busy as usual in the “is she or isn’t she” interim. There were paid speeches to give (at $200,000 a pop) to the American Society of Travel Agents and the National Association of Realtors, filled with the wisdom gleaned from being the nation’s top diplomat (“leadership is a team sport” was one favorite; “you can’t win if you don’t show up” was another).” ↩︎

Robert Zimmerman, Johnathan Orszag, Matthew Hiltzik, and Declan Kelly, in case you’re interested. ↩︎

I did not know that “Jew hair” was a thing until a couple of months ago when I read a review of season 4 of *Broad City” in New York magazine, in which the topic came up. What really surprised me was that a Jewish girl would worry about her Jew hair in New York City. ↩︎

Rog does have a bit of a history of drug and alcohol abuse. So he should fit right in. ↩︎

Carolyn was probably/possibly remembering from biology class how Oswald Avery proved that genetic information is carried by the DNA molecule through a series of famous experiments using pneumonia bacteria. ↩︎

I don’t hate them, but I don’t have to love them, do I? Especially when they fucking bark at six fucking o’clock in the morning! Goddamn it! ↩︎

#Amy Chozick #Hillary Clinton

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