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Get ready for some schadenfreude. We entertain and inform with posts and articles on Amy Chozick’s book on Hillary’s campaign. You will learn more about the bullet our country dodged when HRC lost. First up is the blog – Ace of Spades.
This from a Washington Post review of her book, Chasing Hillary.
She contends that sexism played a big role in Clinton’s defeat but also encounters it first-hand among Clinton’s campaign staff….
When Chozick zeroes in on Clinton and leaves herself out of it, she can be perceptive, pithy and surprising. On Clinton’s apparent disdain for the electoral process: “If there was a single unifying force behind her candidacy, it was her obvious desire to get the whole thing over with.” On Clinton’s ambition: “Her only clear vision of the presidency seemed to be herself in it.”
…
And even on Clinton’s proclivities: “For all the lesbian theories, Hillary enjoys nothing more than flirting with a handsome, preferably straight man.” (Despite aggressively questioning Clinton about her e-mails, Ed Henry became a favorite: “She would regularly look past her almost entirely female press corps to call on the Fox News correspondent, with his cherub cheeks and Pucci pocket squares.”) …
… The Daily Beast has another damning quote — “Basket of Deplorables” was no off-the-cuff line. Hillary routinely used it as a laugh line in big-money fundraising dinners in swank places like the Hamptons.
… That was no slip of the tongue, since “Hillary always broke down Trump supporters into three baskets,” Chozick writes.
“Basket #1: The Republicans who hated her and would vote Republican no matter who the nominee.
Basket #2: Voters whose jobs and livelihoods had disappeared, or as Hillary said, ‘who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens in their lives and their futures.’
Basket #3: The Deplorables. This basket includes ‘the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic–you name it.’
“The Deplorables always got a laugh, over living-room chats in the Hamptons, at dinner parties under the stars on Martha’s Vineyard, over passed hors d’oeuvres in Beverly Hills, and during sunset cocktails in Silicon Valley,” Chozick continues. …
Jim Treacher has more observations.
… Which brings me to Amy Chozick’s upcoming book, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling. (A clumsy, cumbersome title for a clumsy, cumbersome subject.) Chozick was and is a Clinton cheerleader, but I’d like to thank her for serving my delicious, satisfying breakfast of schadenfreude this morning.
As Gideon Resnick’s review of the book in the Daily Beast notes, the Clinton campaign was delighted at the rise of the man who ended up beating her:
From early on, the Clinton camp saw Trump as an enemy to encourage, Chozick writes…
“An agenda for an upcoming campaign meeting sent by [Campaign Manager] Robby Mook’s office asked, ‘How do we maximize Trump?’” Chozick writes, describing a time when the GOP primary was still crowded…
[Chozick writes] “…when the main GOP debate came on, everyone pushed their pizza crust aside and stared transfixed at the TV set… [Campaign Manager] Robby [Mook] salivated when the debate came back on and Trump started to speak. ‘Shhhhh,’ Robby said, practically pressing his nose up to the TV. ‘I’ve gahtz to get me some Trump.’” …
In a tell-all released almost 18 months after the fact, New York Times reporter Amy Chozick has finally decided to inform the public that she and other female journalists dealt with unwanted touching and other forms of sexism at the hands of Hillary Clinton’s male campaign staffers.
Chozick was embedded into Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign for the Times, and from various reviews of the book, she sounds exactly like you expect a New York Times political reporter to sound: a left-wing neurotic currently feeling guilty about covering Clinton’s scandals and desperately needy for Hillary’s attention.
“I still wanted, more than anything, for Hillary to see me as a fair reporter,” Chozick writes. “She really, really hates me,” Chozick whines. “The less I interacted with Hillary,” Chozick admits, “the greater her imperial hold on my brain became.”
What also comes as no surprise is that, even as the media were assailing Trump as a sexist during the campaign, Chozick covered up the real-time sexism she and other so-called reporters personally faced from male Hillary staffers. …
… Does anyone doubt these acts of overt sexism were covered up by our media so as not to derail the attacks on Trump, so as not to remind the public of Hillary’s willingness to attach herself to men who treat women like meat? (See: Clinton, Bill and Weiner, Anthony.)
Does anyone believe these same so-called reporters would have kept all of this a secret if a Republican staffer engaged in unwanted touching or got “gynecological”?
Our media are so corrupt, this information (which directly reflected on Hillary’s judgment and leadership) was not only kept a secret until it no longer mattered; Chozick is admitting she kept it a secret without fear of facing criticism from her peers.
In the Examiner we learn of John Podesta’s lax security.
… Near the end of an essay published Friday , New York Times writer Amy Chozick reveals something she claims to have never told anybody before while covering the Clinton campaign.
“I never told anyone this, but one time when I’d been visiting the Brooklyn campaign headquarters I found an iPhone in the women’s room,” Chozick wrote in the piece adapted from her forthcoming book, “Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling.” “I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to belong to Mr. Podesta’s assistant because when I picked it up, a flood of calendar alerts for him popped up.”
She was referring to John Podesta, who served as chairman of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
After inspecting the device, Chozick claims she left it in the restroom and didn’t share her finding for fear of retribution.
“I placed it on the sink counter, went into the stall, came out and washed my hands. I left the phone sitting there, worried that if I turned it in, even touched it again, aides would think I had snooped. This seemed a violation that would at best get my invitation to the headquarters rescinded and at worst get me booted off the beat for unethical behavior,” she wrote. …
Kyle Smith in National Review has some posts on the Chozick book.
Anyone harboring suspicions that political reporters covering the 2016 campaigns might not have been entirely neutral has just received damning, indeed overwhelming, evidence from an unexpected source: a reporter covering Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the New York Times.
Amy Chozick, the Times’ Hillary embed in 2016, confesses in her new book Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling that she cried when she wrote about Clinton’s defeat, that she had been “an admirer . . . chasing this luminous figure” since meeting Clinton as an awed child at a signing event for It Takes a Village, …
More from Kyle Smith.
A curious dualism emerges in New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s book Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling. As I noted yesterday, Chozick makes it clear that she was rooting for Clinton. But she also thinks Clinton hates her.
Chozick shouldn’t take things so personally: Clinton hates everyone. You can’t relate to people you despise. Her inability to master the basics of being a politician inspired one of the great underreported witticisms of the 2016 campaign, when Donald Trump was asked about his comparatively loose debate preparations. “I don’t need to rehearse being human,” he said.
As a college sophomore, Clinton once described herself as a “misanthrope.” Her inability to hide that made her an amazingly poor candidate, one who would have had difficulty capturing a seat on any city council on her own. Dealing with the populace standing between her and power was never anything but a chore.
Chozick and the other reporters covering Clinton in 2015–16 were pulling for her. You could hear it in the questions they asked. Chozick makes it obvious in her new book. Yet Clinton was convinced this gaggle of liberal women was somehow out to take her down, and she barricaded herself off from them. She was a glum loner, not a happy warrior.
After the election defeat, Chozick met with a Democratic-party stalwart who was a major Clinton supporter in an apartment with a panoramic view of Manhattan and walls covered with Monets. (Chozick doesn’t identify this person.) “Look around,” the big shot told the reporter. “I’m not a loser. Hillary is a L-O-S-E-R.” Then the person made an L sign with one hand. …
… As for larger strategic moves, Chozick notes dryly of a March excursion, “That was Hillary’s last trip to Wisconsin.” Team Clinton in its waning days was spending money in Utah, Indiana, Missouri, Arizona, and even Texas while the Upper Midwest was begging for more resources. Bill Clinton was meanwhile going “red in the face” warning his wife’s team “that Trump had a shrewd understanding . . . of the white working class,” Chozick says. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, responded by spoofing Bill behind his back, as one would Grandpa Simpson: “And let me tell you another thing about the white working class,” he’d say, mockingly.
Clinton mangles the easiest bits of politicking: After voting in Chappaqua in the New York primary, reporters toss the usual softballs (“Secretary! How are you feeling about tonight?”) and she snaps, “Guys, it’s a private ballot” and “Can we get the press out of here, please?” Later, Chozick adds, “Hillary was still following the Mitt Romney Playbook, not realizing that she was the Romney in the race.” On the stump, Clinton wouldn’t stop talking about how much she loved Hamilton, as though the median voter were a New Yorker who could afford to spend a couple of thousand bucks on an evening’s entertainment.
Bill Clinton’s instincts turned out to be absolutely correct, and he had a typically folksy and endearing way of explaining what was happening in America in 2016. He’d tell people that there’s a Zulu greeting that goes, “I see you,” to which the response is, “I am here.” Clinton knew a lot of people thought Trump saw them. Hillary couldn’t stand even glancing in their direction.
We’ll close with Power Line’s take.
… The parts of the book that I read reveal that Chozick was a Hillary fan. She met Hillary when she was a high schooler in San Antonio and has been an admirer ever since.
She referred to Hillary as FWP (first woman president). Chozick and her fellow female reporters on the press bus were fully invested in the Hillary candidacy as a historic event for all women. They were of the same school as Madeleine Albright holding that it was a woman’s duty as a woman to vote for Madam Hillary. In her spiked victory story she wrote, “No one in modern politics, male or female, has had to withstand more indignities, setbacks and cynicism.” While Hillary deserved every bit of the little grief she got, how could Chozick write that line in light of what Donald Trump endured daily on the campaign trail? Two movies on one screen.
On the same page in which Chozik describes herself as having adopted her “role as a detached political reporter” she emotes how Hillary’s victory party “was ours.” This is what Trump’s Fake News is all about: media people claiming to be fair and neutral observers while overtly and covertly cheering for one team in the press box.