From the Jaws of Victory
We’ve read Chasing Hillary so you didn’t have to. The Clinton campaign was even worse than we thought.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton smiles at the crowd at the start of her remarks during a primary night rally at the Duggal Greenhouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, June 7, 2016 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.Drew Angerer / Getty
After a decade of covering Hillary Clinton, New York Times reporter Amy Chozick recently compiled her copious notes and produced the book Chasing Hillary, yet another firsthand account of the campaign and election that produced President Donald Trump. While sympathetic to Clinton — an affection that was, amusingly, not reciprocated by the secretive candidate and her campaign — the book contains its fair share of less-than-sympathetic takeaways, along with other interesting tidbits. We’ve collected ten for your reading pleasure.
1. Joe Biden’s Fear
After flirting with running in 2016, former vice-president Joe Biden ultimately declined to jump in due to what many believed was grief over his son’s death. Yet Chozick argues he was nervous about the prospect of crossing the Clintons to begin with. “You guys don’t understand these people,” Biden had allegedly told the White House press corps off the record one day. “The Clintons will try to destroy me.”
2. Just One of “the Guys”
For all the complaints of misogyny from the Sanders camp, Clinton’s wasn’t immune. There was of course the creepy faith adviser whom she declined to fire, first reported back in January this year. But Chozick also describes an environment of casual, sometimes sexist bullying from “The Guys,” an ever-changing cast of male press aides who served as Clinton’s enforcers in the media world. “I didn’t know I had to say it was off the record when I was inside you,” one of them — now identified as Philippe Reines — told her at one point. “It wasn’t that she didn’t know how The Guys acted,” Chozick writes of Clinton. “It was that she liked them that way.
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