Amy Chozick > Quotes

“Our wedding programs included the Yeats quote, “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“And the day Trump announced he was running, I admitted to a couple of Times editors that I’d watched eight seasons of The Apprentice and that we should do a story about it. They told me political reporters wouldn’t be writing about Trump. “We have enough candidates to cover,” one editor said. “Let the TV writers do it.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“In the end, none of it mattered. I’d always tried to see and cover Hillary as a complete person, with black and white and lots of gray areas, but there was never any gray area in how Hillary saw me. No number of positive, front-page stories could change her mind. And I understood why Hillary hated the Hamptons story in particular. Mingling with the .001 percent looked terrible. But it was true, all of it.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Hey guys, be angry, and then let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work,” she told students at New England College. “Anger is a powerful emotion, but it’s not a plan.” She told aides that during these town halls, she could see voters’ posture change as she explained her practical solutions to help them “get ahead and stay ahead.” Shoulders would relax, arms would unfurl, scowls would soften. She had this. What she didn’t realize at the time—and what I didn’t grasp either until Bernie beat her in New Hampshire by twenty-two points—was that getting ahead doesn’t mean anything to people who have nowhere to go.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“broke” Hillary to hit the Wall Street speech circuit, lending her 2008 campaign $13 million of her own money had turned Hillary in 2016 into both a cheapskate and a ravenous fund-raiser.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and noon, Hillary became a different person. She recited scripture with the fluency of a renowned theologian, the verve of a TV evangelist. She loved the Epistle of James: “Scripture tells us that faith without works is dead.” She said she tried to live up to the prophet Micah’s teachings, “that we do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God.” She explained that her Christianity is “a journey that never”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Bill glimpsed the press piled up, like coiled springs waiting to pounce. Seeing me scrunched in the bottom front, he said, “Oh, hi, Amy.” (Unlike Hillary, who had a gift for looking straight through me as if I were a piece of furniture, Bill always said hello.) Asked about the significance of the evening, he said, “To finish here tonight I felt was important because that is where the country began.” Then Bill Clinton did what he always did. He made the biggest night in Hillary’s life about himself. “It was interesting. You know, I sit on the board of the National Constitution Center . . .”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“That was how I envisioned Hillary’s consultants when they sat in the conference room of her private office in midtown Manhattan to contemplate what to call this curious specimen of 121 million Americans who were technically middle class.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“When all the politics and caution were stripped away, Hillary was at her core a Methodist, a church lady, a fire-and-brimstone Jesus-saves believer. When I try to tell people this, they always say she’s just another pandering politician. Trust me, you don’t drop the prophet Micah in mid-conversation because you’re pandering. You can’t fake extended allusions to the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus (as she did during a town hall in Knoxville, Iowa) or casually quote the Jesuit academic Henri Nouwen’s parable on the prodigal son during a CNN town hall (as Hillary did in response to a rabbi’s question in Manchester).”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Perusing Hillary’s paid speeches to Wall Street banks, Mandy Grunwald expressed her biggest concern. “The remarks below make it sound like HRC DOESNT think the game is rigged—only that she recognizes that the public thinks so,” she said. “They are angry. She isn’t.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Michael Barbaro and I spent all afternoon calling women voters. We declared that women watched the debate “through the same inescapable prism: a raunchy, three-minute recording in which Mr. Trump told of kissing and touching women however he pleased.” We called this “Trump’s new, agonizing and self-created reality” and declared his campaign “imperiled by his careless approach to gender . . .” Less than a month later, Trump would win a majority of white women.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“In 2008, Hillary used to tell me I was asking the wrong questions. “Well, Amy, that’s not what you should be asking . . .” and then proceed to respond to the question she wanted to answer. “God, I wish you weren’t always asking the wrong questions,” Anne Kornblut, the Washington Post reporter, would say as the scrum disassembled.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“In these speeches, she didn’t sound like a “progressive who likes to get things done,” but a smart, savvy technocrat at home among the global elite. Hillary lamented, “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Should she have ditched the legalese and given us the real reason she used a private server? Of course I didn’t want the DISHONEST MEDIA reading through my emails. Look at what they’ve put me through for twenty-five years! That MAKES ME SMART. Could Hillary have told my profession what she really thought of us and dismissed the email story altogether as more “FAKE NEWS”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“The traveling press had become the province of what one prickly print reporter (on his way to a buyout) called “the Human Tripods,” the young network embeds who’d never covered a campaign before and who had to capture everything the candidate did on video.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“When Hillary finished, Tom Harkin took the podium and in nine folksy words stroked Bill’s fragile ego and undermined Hillary in a scene that stayed with me for the rest of the campaign. “We saved the best for last, didn’t we, folks?” Harkin said. Chants of “Bill!” echoed over the grassy field.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“It was late one night at the hotel bar in Johannesburg when Bill told me his daughter is “a very unusual person.” That she was. A couple of nights later, over a South African chardonnay at the Serena Hotel in Kampala, I suggested to Chelsea that we check out the market in the morning. “It’s supposed to be the biggest market in East Africa,” I said. “Actually, in terms of square footage, Nairobi would dispute that,” Chelsea replied.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“fell open as he extemporaneously wove a speech decrying political polarization into a crescendo with flavors of Yeats. “We can never let our hearts turn to stone, and we can never let things fall apart so much that we cannot build a dynamic center where the future of our children counts more than the scars of our past,” he said.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Carly and I got trashed together at the Madonna Inn, me on a house red and Carly on martinis (extra dry) in a Pepto-Bismol-pink leather booth at the Gold Rush Steak House. We then laughed our way back to our suites with their faux-brick fireplaces.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“who sacrificed personal ambition for her husband’s political career”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“point debated by political pundits and historians for years to come. I considered it progress that eight years later, Hillary cried all the time and no one really noticed. There was the time backstage in Manchester when”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“The underpromise line made Brooklyn cringe. It didn’t take a room full of pollsters to know that American voters preferred to elect charismatic men who wildly overpromise.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“By late February, Bill went red in the face on almost daily conference calls trying to warn Brooklyn that Trump had a shrewd understanding of the angst that so many voters—his voters, the white working class whom Clinton brought back to the Democratic Party in 1992—were feeling.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“By the time I left the House of Prayer to get a flight back to Boston and cab it back to Manchester, Flint wasn’t the story. Not even close. Bill Clinton had gone off message. He told a crowd in Milford, New Hampshire, that Bernie was a “hermetically sealed” hypocrite. “When you’re making a revolution, you can’t be too careful with the facts,” he said. Meanwhile, Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem had declared war on young women for supporting Bernie—”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“I never agreed with Hillary that her email server was a nonstory, especially after the FBI opened its investigation, but I would regret—and even resent—that it became the only story. But that was months later, when the emails swallowed everything.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“like, “Can you imagine the epic scandal if the Times’ emails were hacked? It would make Jayson Blair look like nothing.” I nodded and agreed, but I wasn’t sure why he was telling me this. Then he dropped that he knew the cybersecurity firm the Times hired to secure our servers. “Nice guys over there. I’m friends with a couple of them . . .” “Well, okay, nice seeing you,” I said, and I walked back to my seat, a pit in my stomach knowing he’d soon be running the country.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“But nothing made Hillary seem like more of a monarch than her insistence that she be cocooned in the clouds at thirty-six thousand feet a safe distance from the press and the Everydays, surrounded only by her royal court, security, and a spread of crudités.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Well, shoulda, coulda, woulda. She didn’t.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Each day that Trump handed Hillary ready-made attack ads too delicious for any candidate, especially one focused on women and Latinos, to pass up was another day Hillary didn’t talk about jobs or health care or debt-free college.”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't

“Penn was Hillary’s trusted pollster who, after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, went from being the brains behind the former first lady’s political ascent to the asshole responsible for everything bad about the 2008 campaign. (Poor bastard couldn’t even blame the Russians.) Mark had some”
― Amy Chozick, Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't