During Monday evening’s edition of MSNBC’s 11th Hour with Brian Williams, the disgraced former NBC anchorman asked New York Times political reporter and author Amy Chozick if “all the signs” of Hillary’s impending defeat in November of 2016 were obvious to reporters.
Chozick, who was on the program to promote her book Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns and One Intact Glass Ceiling, replied that the final days of the election felt like a “death march to victory” for Clinton because the conventional wisdom was that GOP candidate Donald Trump would obviously lose the presidential contest.
Williams began the exchange by stating: “If we put your clips up on a whiteboard; every thing, every word you had sent back to New York from the campaign.”
“And then we added to it the little signs you were picking up -- the food on the charter plane, the schedule, the fact that the candidate was fine with you guys being in the back of the plane and didn’t feel the need to be any closer to you,” he added.
“Was it all there?” the MSNBC anchor asked. “Were all the signs there to an informed eye?”
“Absolutely,” Chozick replied before noting: “I look back to Iowa” and the “enormous crowds” Vermont Senator and Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders attracted at the time. Nevertheless, “we thought” that Hillary Clinton “was going to win.”
However, she added:
The energy didn’t feel like a winning campaign, and I kept sort of relaying that to people. They said: “All the data, I mean, she’s going to win. She’s got this.”
I said: “Yes, you know, you’re right.” I believed them.
“But I covered [Democratic President Barack] Obama” during the 2008 election, Chozick stated. “You know, I felt sort of the swell of excitement” during that campaign.
“That’s not to say there wasn’t excitement for Hillary,” the New York Times reporter stated. “There was just something about it. Toward the end, we were calling it Hillary’s death march to victory. It just felt like: ‘Why isn’t there more of a swell of, you know, of enthusiasm here for this historic campaign?’”
“And yet, when it came time for that night, this news organization wasn’t prepared,” Williams then noted. “I read that the New York Times didn’t have a piece ready for Donald Trump as elected president.”
“We now know there was no acceptance speech ready at Trump Tower,” he added. “And you didn’t get to write the 'A-1 lead-all front page madam president.' Nobody did.”
“Oh, I wrote it,” the reporter stated. “It just didn’t run.”
“I have a beautiful nut graph that just never ran,” she continued. “I think we were all basing this on, you know, conventional wisdom, and certainly, even both of the campaigns thought the outcome would turn out differently.”
Chozick noted that in her book, she stated: “Actually, the person that was least surprised was Hillary Clinton. She almost sort of never, she never really -- even though of course she thought she was going to win -- she was the happiest I’ve ever seen her in 10 years of covering her on that final day on the road.”
“But when she finally, you know, hit the realization, she thought: ‘They were never going to let me be president,’” the author stated. “It’s what she said.”
“She had that defeatist ideal all along, that she thought the level of misogyny and hatred for her in the country was bigger than any of us sort of anticipated,” Chozick concluded.
As NewsBusters previously reported, the author also noted in Chasing Hillary that “Clinton launched into a ‘f***-laced fusillade’ during a practice session for her televised debate with Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election.”
In one passage, Chozick described a practice debate in which “Clinton reportedly cried ‘You want authentic, here it is!' followed by “a f***-laced fusillade about what a ‘disgusting’ human being Trump was and how he didn’t deserve to even be in the arena.”
“Trump was played in the mock debates by longtime Clinton aide Philippe Reines, the New York Times reported at the time, and “Reines was chosen for the part due to his familiarity with Clinton’s ‘personal and political vulnerabilities,’ enabling him to ‘throw any number of embarrassing comments in her face’ as he imitated her outspoken Republican rival.
Of course, it comes as no surprise that the disgraced former news anchor was anxious to revisit the 2016 campaign since he and other liberals in the press continue to search for reasons Hillary Clinton lost that bid for the White House -- other than the fact that she was so certain of victory that she failed to ”seal the deal” in the final days of the election.
