Читать книгу Chasing Hillary - Amy Chozick - Страница 17
ОглавлениеA zealot cannot be a good cultural anthropologist.
—RUTH BENEDICT, THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD
DES MOINES, 2007
Unlike most campaign reporters who descended on Des Moines each presidential cycle and for all the steak fries and state fairs in between, I’d spent the prior couple of years covering Japan’s consumer culture. I wrote a front-page story about how Westernized diets were causing young Japanese women to have larger breasts (headline: DEVELOPING NATION). In 2007, as my competitors were meeting campaign sources at Centro (CHEN-trow), Des Moines’s hottest restaurant (though there wasn’t a lot of competition), I was clubbing in Shinjuku with Ken-san, a Japanese deejay friend who went by the stage name Intelligent Milli Vanilli, a phonetic challenge for the Japanese. I didn’t know who ran John Kerry’s 2004 campaign. I’d never heard of Politico or its Playbook. The name Barack Obama sounded only vaguely familiar. When Bussey asked me to go to Iowa, I thought for sure I would be riding the Hillary Clinton beat all the way to the White House.
Years later I confessed to one of The Guys that when I got to Iowa, I didn’t know what a caucus was. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We didn’t know what a caucus was either.”
I thought it would be a relief to report in English again, but I still didn’t entirely speak the same language as the people I was covering, especially Mark Penn. Penn was Hillary’s trusted pollster who, after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, went from being the brains behind the former first lady’s political ascent to the asshole responsible for everything bad about the 2008 campaign. (Poor bastard couldn’t even blame the Russians.)
Mark had some terrible ideas (like his early reminder before the 2008 campaign that “being human is overrated …”), but he always saw Bill’s base of white working-class men as a central part of Hillary’s victory. And he turned out to be correct that most voters didn’t want to elect the “First Mama.”
On the flight from Des Moines to Manchester after Hillary came in third place behind Obama and John Edwards, Penn pushed his combed-over sweep of coarse brown hair over his sweaty forehead and told us, “We’re in a strong position to move forward.” I whispered to Anne Kornblut, of the Washington Post, who sat in the bucket seat next to me and pounded so hard on her laptop that her tray table vibrated, “Is that really how they talk?” Anne smiled at me, as if I were a yapping lapdog that she wanted to silence. She went back to transcribing Penn’s comments.
One time in Japan, during an interview with a high-level executive, I asked my interpreter, Ayako-san, to grill him on a question I knew he was evading. She cautioned, “Amy-san, it is extremely rude to ask the same question twice.” I was always inadvertently being rude in Japan, so I told her to go ahead. The executive’s eyes bulged. He leaned in close, his breath smelling of cigarettes and ponzu sauce. “Amy-san, I have already answered that question,” he said in clear but heavily accented English. “My answer is neither yes nor no.”
I remembered that exchange when I first started covering American politics, and whenever we pressed Hillary and her top aides, I imagined them all morphing into anime versions of themselves, with tiny bodies and round bulbous heads, a floating thought bubble on top: We’re in a strong position to move forward. My answer is neither yes nor no.
EVERYTHING SEEMED LIKE a story to me in 2008. I wrote a feature about campaign hookups, a topic so baked into the process that no one thought Secret Service guys (motto: “Wheels Up, Rings Off”) ducking into reporter’s hotel rooms was news. I even convinced one of The Guys to talk on the record about hookups.
When everyone gushed about how nice Iowans were, I caught up with a Des Moines alt-rock band that had gained local fame for venting about the out-of-state media and political elites in a musical number called “Get Outta Our Town (Caucus Lament).” The chorus went, “Get outta our town / Get out of my face / You barged into our home / With your political race.”
By the time Obama was sworn in in 2009, the Murdoch regime had started to exert its influence at the Wall Street Journal. The new ownership, judging our feature stories as having the “gestation of a llama”—or about 350 days—infused the newsroom with a new metabolism for breaking news. But during the campaign my editors still urged me to look for what they called “scoops of ideas,” the offbeat feature stories that nobody else covered. I didn’t realize how pretentious this sounded until I tried to explain the idea to a Politico reporter who could barely look away from his BlackBerry for the twenty seconds it took to reach into the innards of the campaign bus and pull out our luggage for the night.
“Did you even file anything today?” he asked me as he fished out his roller bag.
“No. My editors don’t really want daily stories,” I explained. My inner voice nudged me, Don’t say “scoops of ideas,” but I didn’t listen. “They want ‘scoops of ideas,’ you know, like rather than writing ‘this happened today’ or getting something from the campaign that’s inevitably going to get out anyway, finding a totally different angle that no one else thought of …”
“Uh-huh, you go ahead with your ‘scoops of ideas,’ and I’ll be over here breaking news,” he said.
What I didn’t tell him was that “scoops of ideas” were my only option. I hadn’t yet developed the killer instinct to compete for news, and my editors didn’t seem to care when the Times’ Pat Healy or Politico’s Ben Smith scooped me. Not that I could’ve competed. I hardly had any sources. Unlike my competitors, most of whom had come up covering New York politics or Congress, no one had heard of my byline or me.
Nor did Bussey’s installing me on the Hillary beat sit well with some of the paper’s more seasoned political reporters. By the time I’d switched to the Obama bus in the spring, my counterpart on the McCain campaign staged an intervention. She pulled me aside outside the Journal’s workspace at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. We’d previously teamed up on covering a debate during which she reamed me out for not grasping the nuances between Obama’s and Hillary’s health-care proposals. (“Her plan is a mandate. Repeat slowly after me, MANdate.”) We’d been paired up again, this time to write the front-page story about Hillary’s speech that night in which she would ask her delegates to unite behind Obama. Like Hillary, my coauthor felt the need to extend a strained show of unity to a less experienced colleague.
“Look, I wanted to say I’m sorry. I know I’ve been really mean to you,” she said, blinking rapidly behind the foggy lenses of her glasses as we stood in the August heat against a chain-link fence adjacent to the Pepsi Center’s parking lot. “It’s just that I really don’t think you’re qualified to be doing this job.”
The only person on the Hillary campaign I really got to know was Jamie, the dutiful press wrangler who remained catatonically upbeat even after four hours on a bus with reporters asking her nonstop questions about when we’d get lunch and whether we’d get our Marriott points and “Jamie, can you pass the granola bars back here? Not those, the peanut butter ones …” and “Jamie, I think I left my power cord in Sioux City …” and “Jamie, how long ’til we get there?” She was so smiley and obedient that behind her back The Guys called her the Golden Retriever.
Jamie led us into my first Hillary town hall, held in the Shenandoah fire station. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” blasted from the speakers. I soaked up the Americana. There were homemade pies set up on folding tables against corrugated metal walls and red fire trucks and old men in patch-covered garrison caps. Their wives wore Christmas sweaters with puffy-paint Rudolphs and tiny flickering Christmas lights. Hillary appeared at the front of the room, and before she even said anything, I stood up from my seat and clapped. That’s when I felt Jason George of the Chicago Tribune tugging at the right side of my parka.
“Dude! Dude!” I’d just met Jason that day, but he had the concerned expression of an old friend saving me from swallowing a handful of sedatives. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t do that.”
I looked at the rest of the press, all staring stone-faced at their laptops, too focused on their screens to notice my faux pas. I quickly sat back down in my chair.
