LITMIR.BIZ

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band that had gained local fame for venting about the out-of-state media and political elites in a musical number called “Get Outta Our Town (Caucus Lament).” The chorus went, “Get outta our town / Get out of my face / You barged into our home / With your political race.”

      By the time Obama was sworn in in 2009, the Murdoch regime had started to exert its influence at the Wall Street Journal. The new ownership, judging our feature stories as having the “gestation of a llama”—or about 350 days—infused the newsroom with a new metabolism for breaking news. But during the campaign my editors still urged me to look for what they called “scoops of ideas,” the offbeat feature stories that nobody else covered. I didn’t realize how pretentious this sounded until I tried to explain the idea to a Politico reporter who could barely look away from his BlackBerry for the twenty seconds it took to reach into the innards of the campaign bus and pull out our luggage for the night.

      “Did you even file anything today?” he asked me as he fished out his roller bag.

      “No. My editors don’t really want daily stories,” I explained. My inner voice nudged me, Don’t say “scoops of ideas,” but I didn’t listen. “They want ‘scoops of ideas,’ you know, like rather than writing ‘this happened today’ or getting something from the campaign that’s inevitably going to get out anyway, finding a totally different angle that no one else thought of …”

      “Uh-huh, you go ahead with your ‘scoops of ideas,’ and I’ll be over here breaking news,” he said.

      What I didn’t tell him was that “scoops of ideas” were my only option. I hadn’t yet developed the killer instinct to compete for news, and my editors didn’t seem to care when the Times’ Pat Healy or Politico’s Ben Smith scooped me. Not that I could’ve competed. I hardly had any sources. Unlike my competitors, most of whom had come up covering New York politics or Congress, no one had heard of my byline or me.

      Nor did Bussey’s installing me on the Hillary beat sit well with some of the paper’s more seasoned political reporters. By the time I’d switched to the Obama bus in the spring, my counterpart on the McCain campaign staged an intervention. She pulled me aside outside the Journal’s workspace at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. We’d previously teamed up on covering a debate during which she reamed me out for not grasping the nuances between Obama’s and Hillary’s health-care proposals. (“Her plan is a mandate. Repeat slowly after me, MANdate.”) We’d been paired up again, this time to write the front-page story about Hillary’s speech that night in which she would ask her delegates to unite behind Obama. Like Hillary, my coauthor felt the need to extend a strained show of unity to a less experienced colleague.

      “Look, I wanted to say I’m sorry. I know I’ve been really mean to you,” she said, blinking rapidly behind the foggy lenses of her glasses as we stood in the August heat against a chain-link fence adjacent to the Pepsi Center’s parking lot. “It’s just that I really don’t think you’re qualified to be doing this job.”

      The only person on the Hillary campaign I really got to know was Jamie, the dutiful press wrangler who remained catatonically upbeat even after four hours on a bus with reporters asking her nonstop questions about when we’d get lunch and whether we’d get our Marriott points and “Jamie, can you pass the granola bars back here? Not those, the peanut butter ones …” and “Jamie, I think I left my power cord in Sioux City …” and “Jamie, how long ’til we get there?” She was so smiley and obedient that behind her back The Guys called her the Golden Retriever.

      Jamie led us into my first Hillary town hall, held in the Shenandoah fire station. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” blasted from the speakers. I soaked up the Americana. There were homemade pies set up on folding tables against corrugated metal walls and red fire trucks and old men in patch-covered garrison caps. Their wives wore Christmas sweaters with puffy-paint Rudolphs and tiny flickering Christmas lights. Hillary appeared at the front of the room, and before she even said anything, I stood up from my seat and clapped. That’s when I felt Jason George of the Chicago Tribune tugging at the right side of my parka.

      “Dude! Dude!” I’d just met Jason that day, but he had the concerned expression of an old friend saving me from swallowing a handful of sedatives. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t do that.”

      I looked at the rest of the press, all staring stone-faced at their laptops, too focused on their screens to notice my faux pas. I quickly sat back down in my chair.

       8

       “Taking Back America”

      IOWA, 2007

      Writing for the Wall Street Journal with the nation on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis came with some built-in advantages. Although I still dressed like a Japanese teenager—meaning I wore everything in my closet all at once, jeans under dresses, under blazers, over cardigans until I was one chubby gaijin layer—Hillary, and those on her campaign staff, assumed I was policy minded and serious. Even other reporters would frequently turn to me to ask what Hillary meant after she’d shout at rallies “Mortgage-backed securities!” and “Sub-prime lending!” All of this despite the fact that I couldn’t tell you what equity derivatives were. “No one knows what derivatives are, that’s the whole point,” the Journal’s finance editor once assured me.

      The candidates actually wanted to do interviews with me. I got a forty-five-minute sit-down with Hillary, my longest ever. She predicted the housing crisis, warned that the US could slip into a Japanese-style “malaise” (something I did know about), and criticized NAFTA, the trade deal her husband signed into law in 1993 that would dog her through both of her presidential campaigns.

      “There have been some very positive results of trade [but] … there is still too much of the benefits of trade and the global capital markets favoring elites and multinational companies in a way that is not spreading prosperity,” she told me and my Journal colleague, the economics writer, Bob Davis. Bob and Hillary knew what derivatives were.

      A couple of weeks before the caucuses, the Journal’s politics editor Jake Schlesinger called. “Edwards wants to sit down for an in-depth interview about the economy after his rally today. Can you get to Vinton by two p.m.?” Jake asked.

      I hesitated. I’d been in Iowa long enough to know Vinton was in the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area (if you could call 255,000 people a metro area), a two-hour drive from Des Moines on a good day. But on that day, a blizzard had parked over the state making driving conditions perilous for locals and a particular death trap for a transplant New Yorker driving a rented Hyundai Elantra with no snow tires.

      “This would be exclusive. He asked specifically for the Journal,” Jake said, in a tone neither pushy nor impolite but that told me I didn’t have a choice.

      “Leaving now,” I said, and started to pull on my army-green parka and snow boots.

      The Edwards campaign was in crisis mode after the National Enquirer’s JOHN EDWARDS LOVE CHILD SCANDAL! story broke. We’d all been too polite to follow the story, maybe because Edwards’s wife Elizabeth had cancer or because we all thought ourselves above chasing the Enquirer or both. Still, for Hillary there exists an alternative route in the Rube Goldberg of why she will never become the FWP: The media runs with the Edwards baby-daddy scandal, causing him to drop out before the caucuses, allowing Hillary to pick up enough of his supporters to win Iowa, halting Obama’s momentum before it started, and allowing her to win the nomination and defeat John McCain.

      Trucks skidded off the interstate. I could hardly see the road and felt my tires floating on a layer of ice and snow. By the time I arrived in the cafeteria of Vinton High, Edwards was finishing his tirade against the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots.

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