New York Times reporter Amy Chozick writes in her new memoir that she cried after finishing her article on how Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
Chozick covered Clinton for a decade during stints at the Wall Street Journal and now at the New York Times, which meant covering her ultimately doomed presidential bids in 2008 and 2016. Her experiences and insights make up her new book Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling.
According to the Washington Post review of her book, "the day after the 2016 election, Chozick sat in her cubicle and wrote the "how she lost" story. "Then I finally cried," she writes.
That article was entitled, "Hillary Clinton's Expectations, and Her Ultimate Campaign Missteps." Chozick wrote in the postmortem:
Her campaign had built-in contradictions and challenges. She wanted to make history as the first female president, but she did not want to play it up so much so that she would turn off men. She vowed to help the little guy, but she accepted millions of dollars for speeches to Wall Street. She wanted to bring the country together, but she suffered from a stubbornly high number of voters who did not trust or like her.
Chozick acknowledged standing and applauding when Clinton walked into a town hall she covered in 2008, leading to an admonishment from a fellow reporter: "What the hell are you doing?"
Chozick frets in the book about her relationship with Clinton, mourning at one point to her husband that, "she really, really hates me." She also viewed herself as a symbol of Clinton's distrust of the press.
"Ours was destined to be an impossible, tortured, and unrelentingly tense relationship weighed down by old grudges and fresh grievances," Chozick writes. "To Hillary, I was a big ego with no brain and no amount of cordial small talk could make up for the bad blood between her world and mine."
She also writes critically, as others have, of Clinton's lack of a clear message in her White House bid, according to the Washington Post:
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." On how Trump threw Clinton off message: "Hillary had berated our pea-size political brains for being uninterested in policy. Now, Trump had made her as devoid of substance as he was."