I Was Wrong About Hillary Clinton

As a young reporter in 2008, I guessed Hillary would never seek the presidency again. Here’s why I’m glad I was incorrect.

Back when I was only two years into a career in writing and comedy, my first big media job was as a “citizen journalist” for the 2008 MTV News Choose or Lose Street Team.

I’d found the inital job ad on Craigslist, which is a digital product that isn’t Snapchat. My assignment was to cover campaign politics in New York by shooting and editing my own reported stories for the web. And Super Tuesday, which fell on February 5, 2008, was my first chance to really get out there and pound the pavement.

I was 27 years old and I lived with my then-boyfriend (now a publishing supahstah — go buy his stuff!) in a 400-square foot studio apartment in the semi-affordable Yorkville section of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I wore a lot of American Apparel. I was sometimes a nightmare, but I was a very hardworking nightmare.

I did Total Request Live (RIP) that day to promote voting and also some branded phone (I think it involved something called Flixwagon that streamed live to web). It was the first time I had ever done national television, and I was nervous. My New Jersey accent emerged as it sometimes does when I’m agitated. My fellow young comedian friends mocked the hell out of me, because the best way to show your comedian friend love and to undermine her joy in a career accomplishment is to assassinate her vowel pronunciation. I think my spot was right after glowing blonde superstars Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson promoted Fools’ Gold (I think TRL made them do a baby-diapering race with dolls because one of them was about to have a kid? I have no idea) and right before the comedian Martin Lawrence. My producer, the filmmaker Liz Nord, assured me that I hadn’t seemed nervous at all. I hugged her. (She’s still my friend today.)

I interviewed folks in the field all day. For part of it, I was out with Sway Calloway, who was hailed in the streets by everyone we passed. I have never seen somebody cheerfully grant so many hugs and high fives with nary an ounce of impatience or fatigue. At some point it started to rain, so I ran into H&M and got a Kermit the Frog-style reporter trench. I expected a News Emmy to fall from the sky, hurled perhaps by the angelic spirit of my lifelong role model, the late great Molly Ivins, who had died of breast cancer one year and one week prior. But this did not occur. (Side note: the entire project won an Emmy later that year in the Digital or News or Something Else realm. MTV Senior VP of Strategic Partnerships & Public Affairs Ian Rowe oversaw the whole thing before moving on to the Gates Foundation as the Deputy Director of Postsecondary Success.)

On Super Tues-night, I was sent to cover the Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) non-victory party at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Hillary had edged out Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) with 46% of the popular vote to his 45%. But he took 13 contests versus her 10. This meant that in the end he picked up 847 delegates to her 834.

I had privately believed that since Senator Clinton had more legislative experience and those 8 years in the White House, she was the superior presidential candidate. However, I wasn’t too excited about her. Obama had that charisma and sparkle, and he meant so much to so many people for so many reasons, not the least of which was the color of his skin. He had a uniquely American backstory, a beautiful young family, a great sense of humor, and a celebrity’s ease in the harsh light of the camera.

More significantly, he hadn’t voted in October 2002 to authorize President George W. Bush to use military power in Iraq. Then again, he hadn’t been in the United States Senate at the time, so he’d never had the chance to make that decision. Today, when I read Senator Clinton’s actual statement on the floor of the Senate the day she cast her vote to give Bush military authority to invade, I am struck by both her naivete and her genuine reluctance, fear, and caution. I am also struck by the horrors that Bush and Cheney were able to commit based on the lies they told Congress (which should’ve known better) and the American people.

I remember watching people ride motorcycles around Boston Common the night of September 11, 2001, screaming pro-American slogans and waving the flag like it was a pep rally. I said to my friend, “I am scared because of what happened today and I am even more scared about what will happen for years to come.”

At the time of that fateful Senate vote in 2002, I passionately opposed “military intervention” in Iraq. I recognized then and now that there was probably no way the junior senator from New York would go against the President in this regard, particularly since she was elected to carry out the will of the people in a state that had seen 2,606 human beings murdered in Lower Manhattan not 13 months prior. But I didn’t like her vote. I thought she could’ve voted the other way. I thought she should’ve. But the Bush Administration had launched a full-scale media blitz to convince us all that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was directly tied to the Al-Qaeda powers who oversaw the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The drums of war were loud and relentless. Smart people made shitty choices.

I later learned that she would come to agree with me and millions of others on this point. But hindsight is 20/20 and so many people were dead. She was just one of many who voted to give Bush the power to invade Iraq, but in 2008 she was the only one with a shot at the Democratic nomination for president. Therefore, her vote mattered more.

In a more superficial sense, Candidate Hillary just didn’t get me invigorated. She was steady and brilliant and all that, but her movement didn’t feel like a revolution. Obama’s did. And indeed it was.

Still, I admired her for her tenacity, hard work, and dignity in the face of relentless attacks by a media that couldn’t believe a woman would choose to work (for universal healthcare, for the actual desegregation of the public school system in Alabama, for a million other things) instead of giving tea parties and baking cookies. They dragged her for a husband who cheated and they dragged her for going to marriage counseling and staying with him. They dragged her for her hair, her clothes, her laugh, her everything.

I believe she came to represent to three generations of fragile, mediocre white men their growing inadequacy and irrelevance. They were so accustomed to de facto privilege, and in the early ’90s, the prominence of a Hillary Rodham Clinton felt like the rumblings of what would later come to pass. She was a harbinger of something they couldn’t articulate, but they knew they didn’t like it. And so this little blonde gal from the Midwest became not a decorative symbol of either sex or emotional support but, to their endless and unceasing rage, a workhorse who got shit done without apologizing for it. Nancy Reagan had ruled the White House with an iron fist and pretended in public to be sweet as pie. Hillary Clinton was a boss who didn’t hide it. They hated the fact that she wasn’t ashamed of her own power.

When I walked into the Hammerstein Ballroom that night in 2008, the vibe was so upbeat. The place was packed. People seemed, of all things, happy. I gazed around from my place up in the balcony with all the press.

“Pretty fucking cool,” I said aloud (though thankfully not when I was broadcasting live via that aforementioned magic phone.)

I’d never been to such a big political event before and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Anyway, some veteran reporters let me hang out with them, probably because I was cute. My boobs weren’t as big as they are now, but I was thinner, so my eyes seemed bigger and I’m sure I looked like Political Bambi. These things are currency in the world of straight guys who are underpaid to work long hours and type words about those who would be king.

One guy said, “You know, if she doesn’t get this, maybe she can be his VP. He’ll need someone with her experience.”

Another guy said, “Oh, she’s not going to take a subordinate position like that. Hillary Clinton? No way.”

And a third guy said, “The nation is so fatigued after the Bush years that they’ll elect Obama twice. Then it’s her turn to run.”

“Nah,” I said, with all the confidence of a 27-year-old who had been covering campaign politics for exactly two months. “Senator Obama is amazing but c’mon. The majority will vote for Senator John McCain. Dude picked up 602 delegates today…Plus McCain’s a war hero and a longtime senator with that whole no-bullshit, straight-talk thing going on. Everybody knows Bush and Rove dicked him over with racist smear tactics in South Carolina in 2000. There’s this feeling that it’s his time. He deserves it, in their opinion. He’ll win this one.”

“Obama, though,” a dude said. “He’s the real deal.”

“I hear that,” I said. “He is. I hope he wins. But he won’t. He’s so young yet. It’s McCain’s year. I just don’t see how McCain can fuck this one up.”

Remember, this was February 2008. Not until September would Senator John McCain cater to the racist, homophobic zealots by picking folksy Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (with whom my MTV colleague Dani Carlson — now Bickford — of Alaska got an interview on Super Tuesday. Palin was into Romney at the time and Dani’s still my friend today). But we cannot ignore the fact that McCain did indeed pick Palin.

And in so doing, the entire GOP put its legs behind its ears and presented its gaping butthole to the hateful, willfully ignorant hordes that Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and other professional pretend Christ-followers had cultivated as the GOP’s base since the AIDS-ignoring, media-deregulating, “welfare queen”-demonizing Reagan years. Understood through the time-honored literary metaphor of assfuckery (in and of itself a neutral concept!), Donald Trump is the inevitable sentient shit-blob who emerged years later, comprised of all the stinking, decaying deitritus that has so long caked the Republican Party’s innards. The Republican Party has needed a strong anal doucheing for nigh on 40 years. Donald Trump is what happens when you don’t, um, clean house.

(Lest you fear I’m hijacking Dan Savage’s definition of santorum,“the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex,” I must point out that the ass-plundering to which the GOP happily submitted itself in 2008 didn’t require lube. This is a Party that’s really into pain.)

As of the moment I’m writing this, not 48 hours after Trump put down the dog whistle and just straight-up made a jolly death threat against future president Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator McCain has yet to disavow him or refuse to endorse him. In the meantime, Donald Trump commands a violently racist army of soulless, brainless, heartless white criminal minds. Winter is Here, y’all and the White Walkers have semi-automatic weapons.

But back in 2008, Senator John McCain seemed like he might provide some kind of dignified version of a Republican Party that had traded on hate and fear. Ha. Ha. Ha.

That night in February 2008 I said, “Senator Obama has a great shot in ’12 or ’16. But he’s too young yet. And Hillary will probably retire in a few years. She’ll want to relax. Garden. Get away from the spotlight. Chill out in Chappaqua. Give speeches. I think this is her last shot at this.”

I don’t like to be wrong. I don’t like admitting when I’m wrong. I do it, and I apologize, and I endeavor to do better in future. But I don’t like it. Not usually, anyway.

But today, in 2016, I am so enormously, inescapably, unabashedly, enthusiastically, proudly delighted to admit that I was wrong about Hillary Clinton. She had more resilience than I could’ve imagined. She has evolved, and she is thriving. And so long as we band together to stop Trump, we can and will make her the next president of the United States.

Pretty fucking cool, indeed.