Читать книгу Chasing Hillary - Amy Chozick - Страница 18

Writing for the Wall Street Journal with the nation on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis came with some built-in advantages. Although I still dressed like a Japanese teenager—meaning I wore everything in my closet all at once, jeans under dresses, under blazers, over cardigans until I was one chubby gaijin layer—Hillary, and those on her campaign staff, assumed I was policy minded and serious. Even other reporters would frequently turn to me to ask what Hillary meant after she’d shout at rallies “Mortgage-backed securities!” and “Sub-prime lending!” All of this despite the fact that I couldn’t tell you what equity derivatives were. “No one knows what derivatives are, that’s the whole point,” the Journal’s finance editor once assured me.

The candidates actually wanted to do interviews with me. I got a forty-five-minute sit-down with Hillary, my longest ever. She predicted the housing crisis, warned that the US could slip into a Japanese-style “malaise” (something I did know about), and criticized NAFTA, the trade deal her husband signed into law in 1993 that would dog her through both of her presidential campaigns.

“There have been some very positive results of trade [but] … there is still too much of the benefits of trade and the global capital markets favoring elites and multinational companies in a way that is not spreading prosperity,” she told me and my Journal colleague, the economics writer, Bob Davis. Bob and Hillary knew what derivatives were.

A couple of weeks before the caucuses, the Journal’s politics editor Jake Schlesinger called. “Edwards wants to sit down for an in-depth interview about the economy after his rally today. Can you get to Vinton by two p.m.?” Jake asked.

I hesitated. I’d been in Iowa long enough to know Vinton was in the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area (if you could call 255,000 people a metro area), a two-hour drive from Des Moines on a good day. But on that day, a blizzard had parked over the state making driving conditions perilous for locals and a particular death trap for a transplant New Yorker driving a rented Hyundai Elantra with no snow tires.

“This would be exclusive. He asked specifically for the Journal,” Jake said, in a tone neither pushy nor impolite but that told me I didn’t have a choice.

“Leaving now,” I said, and started to pull on my army-green parka and snow boots.

The Edwards campaign was in crisis mode after the National Enquirer’s JOHN EDWARDS LOVE CHILD SCANDAL! story broke. We’d all been too polite to follow the story, maybe because Edwards’s wife Elizabeth had cancer or because we all thought ourselves above chasing the Enquirer or both. Still, for Hillary there exists an alternative route in the Rube Goldberg of why she will never become the FWP: The media runs with the Edwards baby-daddy scandal, causing him to drop out before the caucuses, allowing Hillary to pick up enough of his supporters to win Iowa, halting Obama’s momentum before it started, and allowing her to win the nomination and defeat John McCain.

Trucks skidded off the interstate. I could hardly see the road and felt my tires floating on a layer of ice and snow. By the time I arrived in the cafeteria of Vinton High, Edwards was finishing his tirade against the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. I wouldn’t appreciate Edwards’s “Two Americas” and his populist pitch decrying inequality and global trade until 2016 when Bernie and Trump used an almost identical playbook. Edwards ended up an imperfect messenger, a slick millionaire trial lawyer with a love child. We know, we know, you’re the son of a millworker. But he was ahead of his time.

I found an empty seat next to the New York Times’ Julie Bosman. Julie was the paper’s Edwards beat reporter until, as a Times editor liked to say, “Her horse didn’t just die. He got caught fucking Secretariat.” Edwards concluded his Vinton speech by pointing to our thinly populated press area.

“You see all those reporters in the back?” he said, in a gesture that felt like a game-show host breaking the fourth wall. A scattering of heads turned around. I met eyes with an older white man in denim overalls and a purple-and-gold SEIU button. “They’ll be writing ‘He said, she said,’ while we’re TAKING BACK AMERICA!”

He was even ahead of his time in shaming the elite media.

I approached Edwards backstage as his press secretary had instructed and extended my hand to shake his.

“Hi, Senator, I’m …”

Edwards glanced briefly at me and kept walking. “Just a second honey,” he said, flashing a palm at me in a halting motion. “I got an interview with the Wall Street Journal.”

“I am the Wall Street Journal,” I said.