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Howard Kalodner

... I am a reporter for the Associated Press, and I spent more than two years writing and thinking and talking about Hillary. I documented her screw-ups and her finest moments; I dismissed her as an amateur and pronounced her senatorial; I memorized her speeches and obscure facts about her life (middle name, Diane; birthdate, 10-26-47; favorite color, yellow; number of months she took for maternity leave after Chelsea was born, four; where she met Bill, in the Yale law library); I watched her laugh hysterically and I saw her eyes well up with tears; I sang her “Happy Birthday” and I received a present from her for my children; and I asked her everything from whether she had plastic surgery to her views on a Palestinian state to why a guy who owns strip clubs in Chicago was on the list of donors who slept over at the White House. When she made news, it was exciting; but more often, it was mundane, and the way I entertained myself was by becoming a Hillary Kremlinologist, the type of person who knows that when she drapes a blue sweater over her shoulders without actually putting her arms through the sleeves, she’s trying to appeal to suburban women; when she wears a skirt, she’s going to church; when she’s happy and making jokes with her press corps, she’s up in the polls; when she shuts down every question by answering, “I’ll leave that to others to characterize,” she’s gotten a talking-to from Bill about how to get reporters to change the subject; and when she calls somebody “My good friend...” she’s pandering to whatever ethnic group the alleged friend belongs to.

In The Boys on the Bus, a book about the press corps covering the 1972 presidential campaign, author Timothy Crouse said the reporters “followed the candidate everywhere, heard his standard speech so many dozens of times they could recite it with him, watched his moods go up and down, speculated constantly on his chances, wrote songs about him, told jokes at his expense, traded gossip about him, and were lucky if they did not dream about him into the bargain.” Twenty-eight years later, about the only difference I saw was that our candidate was a woman -- a woman whose staff and whose press corps was more than half female. We were no longer the boys on the bus; if anything, we were the girls in the van.

***

...Ahead of us are Hillary and her aides in her van, a shiny black-and-gray custom Ford with tinted windows and white Washington, D.C., plates that begin with the letters "AR," as in "Arkansas"; it would be months before she’d switch to New York plates. Her van has a raised roof a foot high, and I always wonder what's stored inside. Her aides insist it just provides extra headroom, but I can't help think that maybe there's a nuclear hotline up there, just in case the president catches a ride with her, or some kind of satellite tracking device in case she's kidnapped. I once asked Gregg Birnbaum of the New York Post what he thought was up there and he said, "I have no idea. I've never been in the van. No one has ever been in the van." One of the AP photographers, Suzanne Plunkett, calls it the Hillary Mystery Van. Bob Hardt from the Post and Joel Siegel from the Daily News call it HRC Speedwagon, a reference to an old rock band, REO Speedwagon. At various points during the campaign, I became obsessed with peeking into the van, just because it was so completely off-limits to us. One day, looking through the window on the driver’s side at the backseat where Hillary sat, I noticed a huge, ugly plastic shopping bag from the Duane Reade drug store. It appeared to be overflowing with items that I could not make out through the tinted glass, but I found it very amusing to imagine one of Hillary’s aides running in Duane Reade like everybody else in New York, filling a shopping basket with lipstick and Tylenol and little packs of tissues and nail files and panty hose and breath mints and Band-aids and God knows what else. Even a first lady has to wipe her nose sometimes. Then, of course, I felt like a media vulture. Jeez, couldn’t the woman make a trip to the drug store without me trying to snoop around on her?

***

“Beth?” she said. “My friend just called to tell me that Hillary was on the Channel 2 news talking about how you potty-trained Nathaniel. How is that possible?”

“WHAT?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“My friend Bea told me she saw Hillary on Channel 2 news talking to the Associated Press reporter about potty-training, so she figured that had to be you, and she called me. Why was Hillary talking about that on TV?”

“Well, she asked me how my vacation was,” I said, slowly trying to remember the rest of the conversation, “and I told her I’d potty-trained Nathaniel, but I didn’t realize the cameras were rolling...”

My mother-in-law’s friend Beatrice Hart had been right. The lead item on the WCBS-TV news had been a story about “The New Hillary,” by their political correspondent, Marcia Kramer. The anchor’s lead-in was, “She’s shedding her old image and showing voters the kinder, gentler Hillary,” and the entire piece was about how she’d invited us all to go have coffee with her one morning after she held a press conference with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to get his personal endorsement. The event was held in a relatively remote area of Riverside Park, on a narrow path with the Hudson River on one side, and a fenced-in grassy hill and the West Side Highway on the other side. It was difficult to find from the street, and because it was a weekday morning, there were very few passerbys, making it an ideal location for a Casual Hillary Moment. She couldn’t be mobbed here, and the Secret Service agents appeared to be as relaxed as they ever were, displaying none of their usual obsessions with controlling where we were standing or moving.

That day just happened to be my first day back on the beat after a vacation in Maine. A couple of the other reporters asked me what I’d done when I was away, and to the two mothers of young children in the group, Liz Moore of Newsday and Andrea Bernstein of WNYC-AM radio, the National Public Radio affiliate, I explained that I had taken advantage of my rare sojourn as a full-time mommy to toilet-train my two-year-old. Liz had just done the same with her youngest, and Andrea proudly announced that her two-year-old was using the potty, too.

A few minutes later, after the press conference with RFK Jr., Hillary motioned to us to follow her a few steps away to a café located right in the park with a big table overlooking the water. “C’mon,” she said, “let’s go have coffee!” She was in a relaxed, expansive mood; she’d made small talk with Marcia about taking a lot of vitamins to get through the final weeks of the campaign, tried on Andrea’s headphones and waved to a couple of people gliding by in a boat on the sparkling blue water. She sat down with the café proprietor, who earlier that morning had walked over to where she was holding the news conference and introduced himself as someone who strongly supported her campaign. A couple of reporters sat down around the table while the rest of us stood, not really sure what to make of it all. All of a sudden as she looked around at us, her eyes fixed on me. I guess after covering her for nearly two years, she’d noticed my absence over the past few weeks and took note of my return. “Hi Beth!” she called out cheerily. “How was your vacation?”

Since I’d just finished telling the potty-training story, it was still on the tip of my tongue. “It was great!” I responded without hesitation. “I potty-trained my two-year-old!”

“You did what?” she said.

All of a sudden it hit me that I probably should have given a more conventional answer like, “It was so relaxing!” But now it was too late.

“I potty-trained my two-year-old,” I replied in a small voice.

She looked at me expectantly, as if she still wasn’t sure she’d heard me right. Then she repeated it back to me. “You potty-trained your two-year-old?”