I noted the other day the appearance in the New York Times of an excerpt of Amy Chozick’s memoir covering Hillary Clinton. I found the piece interesting for how it highlighted Clinton’s Nixonian paranoia: “They were never going to let me be president,” she said on election night. Chozick had some self-flagellating ideas about who “They” might be.
What I didn’t realize was Chozick’s tone in the Times excerpt apparently extends throughout her 400-page (!!) book. She worries and whines—“Jesus did I whine”—and frets about what the candidate thinks of her.
Amidst all of that worrying, whining, and fretting, Chozick occasionally found time to do actual journalism. But as Eddie Scarry writes at The Daily Caller today, she seems to have felt bad about it.
“The one story Chozick, with the help of two other reporters, wrote of consequence related to the emails was on excerpts of private paid speeches that showed Clinton ‘at home’ with big Wall Street bankers,” Scarry notes. But she ignored an email exchange in which Clinton campaign chief John Podesta referred to former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former Transportation and Energy Secretary Federico Peña, and former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar as “needy Latinos.”
Scarry seems to think that’s the more important story—a powerful white man disparaging Latino leaders—and says of the Wall Street bankers story, “There is more juice in a bag of sunflower seeds.”
Pointing out Democrats’ hypocrisy on identity politics is fun, without a doubt. But the Wall Street story was important for highlighting how Clinton often would say one thing in private, before a paying audience, and another to the suckers on the campaign trail.
“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future with energy that’s as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere,” she told investors in a paid speech she gave to Brazilian Banco Itau in 2013.
That wasn’t what she talked about during the campaign, however.
And Donald Trump savaged her for it.