Reporter's notebook: Chasing Hillary Clinton
I was standing outside a Starbucks in the West Village in New York City on the day that Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president. It was April 12, 2015. I had covered a couple of Clinton’s paid speeches and her now-infamous press conference at the United Nations. Then, on May 5th of that year, I was assigned to cover Clinton full-time.
One thing that I heard right away from voters was how “experienced” Clinton was. I heard it over and over again. That’s what set her apart in the minds of many Americans, regardless of their age or where they lived or their race or social status. Some even went so far to suggest that her years in a system so gridlocked were actually the key to breaking through it.
But “experience” wasn’t what I saw inspire Clinton’s most dedicated supporters as I traveled the country with her.
Last October, Clinton made an appearance on Saturday Night Live to play a bartender named “Val.” It was a short but memorable skit and, in the days that came next, “Val” followed Clinton back to the campaign trail. I took note of a woman in Manchester, New Hampshire, who politely asked Clinton if she could call her “Hillary.” “Or you can call me Val,” Clinton joked.
Later, I took a picture of a woman in Muscatine, Iowa, who had brought a homemade sign to an event that read “Val for President” in capital letters. She loved seeing Clinton in that role, and told me she thought she seemed like a “natural comedian.”
I’ll always remember the speech that Clinton gave in San Diego in June. The speech was billed as a speech on national security, and it was, but it was also an unrelenting takedown of Clinton’s soon-to-be opponent, Donald Trump. It became the first major speech of many in which Clinton turned Trump’s own words against him, and she branded him as unfit and wholly unqualified. That would become central to her argument against him.
Her supporters in California loved it. “Fighting fire with fire” was how one woman put it to me two days later. Another supporter in Sacramento told me that the speech let voters “finally see this is a two-person race.”
Something similar happened months later, after the presidential debates. Clinton’s top advisers already felt the debates gave their candidate the chance to show off her smarts, her dedication to preparation and her true grit. And then, during Clinton’s final head-to-head with Trump last month, Trump leaned into his microphone and uttered four words: “such a nasty woman.”
The call had gone out. Reporters covering Michelle Obama in Phoenix, Arizona the next day tweeted photos of women wearing t-shirts, apparently made by hand overnight, emblazoned with “nasty woman” and “I’m with nasty.” I saw the same kind of thing in the days that followed, from Lake Worth, Florida to Winston-Salem, North Carolina to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
What these voters, who I met in different parts of the country at different times in the race, have in common is that they seemed to be looking for a different side of their “experienced” candidate. They found it. It was funny, sarcastic, unapologetic, empowering.
But they might have been in the minority.
A few weeks ago, Clinton shared her birthday cake with reporters aboard her campaign plane and she lingered in the crammed press cabin just long enough to answer a few questions. One reporter asked Clinton if she felt like she had succeeded in showing the American people the “real Hillary.”
“I think we’ve done very well in explaining what I stand for and what I want to do,” Clinton said. “I think people know they can count on me. I will try to do everything I have said I will do. I will make it my mission as President every single day to see what I can do to help more people live up to their dreams. I think that’s what the job requires and that’s what I’m going to do.”
In short, it didn’t matter. Whether or not voters saw the real her wasn’t going to keep her from doing the job.
As a reporter covering Clinton, I also looked for the “real Hillary.” Her campaign released a video in the lead up to Election Day that told the story of Clinton’s run, from her announcement to her nomination through her battle with Trump in the general.
Most of the scenes were familiar to me: her “Scooby van” rolling down the street (I’ve staked out that van more times than I’d like to say), Clinton testifying on the Hill (I was there), the rally in Miami where Clinton introduced Tim Kaine as her running mate (I was there). But some of them were not. There was a quick shot, barely three seconds, of Clinton resting her head on her husband’s shoulder on an airplane. She looked like she was asleep.
I had been tracking her every move for more than 500 days and I had never seen that.
But in her concession speech, hastily arranged in a hotel ballroom in Manhattan, I think that I finally saw Clinton as the person she said she was all along. It’s not whether or not you get knocked down, it’s whether or not you get back up, she would often say. She was knocked down and, quite literally, knocked out. But she was getting back up.
“This loss hurts,” she said. “But please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.” Clinton invoked Galatians, as I had heard her do many times before, on Sundays in churches across the country.
“Scripture tells us let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.”