NYT Reporter’s Tell-all on Hillary campaign is full of fun stuff

New York Times reporter Amy Chozik has written a book about the Hillary campaign, and a write-up in the Daily Beast shows the book is full of fun stuff on Hillary.  Here are some samples:

On how the NYT would have covered Hillary’s win:

The New York Times story about Hillary Clinton’s historic victory that would have run under the headline “Madam President” spread across six front-page columns

So so so sad we never got to see that.

On Biden running for President:

Chozick writes that the Clinton campaign, which she covered from the beginning, had reacted furiously to the prospect of a Joe Biden run, as floated first in an August 2015 Maureen Dowd Times column and then in a reported story by Chozick. In the book, she writes that “Biden had confided (off the record) to the White House press corps that he wanted to run, but he added something like ‘You guys don’t understand these people. The Clintons will try to destroy me.’”

On Hillary’s likability:

“A week earlier, she’d cut off Joel and the pollster John Anzalone, as they walked her through the almost daily reminder that half the country disliked her,” Chozick writes. “You know, I am getting pretty tired of hearing about how nobody likes me,” she said.

“‘Oh, what’s the point? They’re never going to like me,’ Hillary told this friend.”

“After the convention, donors asked Brooklyn what they planned to do to pull Hillary’s trust numbers out of the toilet. The answer was always the same: nothing. Podesta would explain ‘I remember no one trusted Bill Clinton and he won twice.’”

On the basket of Deplorables:

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.

“‘I really messed up,’ [Clinton] told aides that night,” Chozick writes of the evening when the candidate’s Deplorables shtick went public.

On the job of Telling Hillary She LOST on Election night:

“Of all the Brooklyn aides, Jen Palmieri had the most pleasant bedside manner,” Chozick writes. “That made her the designated deliverer of bad news to Hillary. But not this time. She told Robby there was no way she was going to tell Hillary she couldn’t win. That’s when Robby, drained and deflated, watching the results with his team in a room down the hall from Hillary’s suite, labored into the hallway of the Peninsula to break the news. Hillary didn’t seem all that surprised. ‘I knew it. I knew this would happen to me….’ Hillary said, now within a couple of inches of his face. ‘They were never going to let me be president.’”

Oh what fun!

And for fun, here’s how we imagine what happened next:

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