“Chasing Hillary,” by Amy Chozick is, though often quite funny, deeply infused with despair.
She calls the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign “noxious” and “soul-crushing,” and it was for two reasons: First, because so many people hated both candidates so much they had problems in choosing the lesser of evils; and second because Clinton found every step of the way an ordeal.
“The Death March to Victory,” Chozick called it when Hillary seemed to be winning. “[I]f there was a single unifying force behind her candidacy,” she wrote, “it was her obvious desire” to see it all end. Chozick frames the book as Hillary’s struggle to become the FWP, or First Woman President, and sets it in terms of a gender-based story.
But it’s really the case of a much more familiar and often quite tragic story — the tale of the klutz, out of his league in the closest of struggles, and quite often shooting his feet. There was Al Gore in 2000; Mitt Romney (to a lesser extent) in 2012; and now there is Hillary, kicking away a winnable race via tone-deafness, and proving a woman — the first woman candidate of a big national party — can lose just as big as the boys can.
In politics, as in all sports, there are the naturals — see Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and John F. Kennedy — who never lose an election or get very much wrong, relate to anyone on any level without even trying, have a gear in their heads that automatically adjusts their speech to the idiom and emotional level of the crowd they’re addressing. These people never have to resort to nastiness on any level, as they can tear a rival to shreds with a quip.
If the signature move of the natural is “There you go again,” with which Ronald Reagan decked Jimmy Carter, then the ultimate move of the klutz is Gore looming over George W. Bush in the the last debate in 2000. Bush looked up, nodded at him, and calmly went on with his speech.
The naturals love campaigning, even when being yelled at, as they can usually make their critics look silly. The klutzes say the wrong things when they try to be serious — like “47 percent” and “deplorables” — and often look silly themselves.
The klutz is often a legacy candidate — from Al Gore Sr., George Romney, or Bill Clinton. He or she is given a hand-up in the terms of money or fame accrued by another, and given a chance or obligation that always seems pressing, that he or she might not have personally chosen. Forced to campaign, the klutz tends to resent it.
“She wore her discomfort all over her face,” writes Chozick of Clinton, describing her at a steak fry in Iowa, holding a spatula as if a snake had been wound on its handle, with a smile so strained it looked like a grimace, convoying a sense of distress.
Chozick imagines her thinking: “How long do I have to act like I enjoy this?” And “Dear God, what am I doing?” And, “Why the f— am I back in this state?” She never developed a rationale for her run, as she thought she herself was the reason. She squandered her high after her convention by hanging around with the rich and going to blue states. When asked if she thought her campaign had been “joyous,” she raised her arms, and said “And off we go, joyfully!” in a you-can-all-go-f— yourselves tone.”
Hillary lost not because she was a woman, but because she was a klutz. That’s good news for women, many of whom are not klutzes. It means somebody better will be along soon.
