Hillary and the Invisible Women

Hillary Clinton's run-up to the Texas and Ohio primaries was the political equivalent of Hell Week for a Navy SEAL. At least it felt that way for the reporters who'd been participating in this killing Democratic marathon since the Iowa caucuses in January and now, dosed up on Airborne and bad coffee, were covering what was being billed as Hillary's last stand.

As a campaign virgin who joined the press bus on Saturday morning in Ft. Worth, Texas, I was staggered by how isolated accompanying reporters actually are most of the time. It's like being trapped in a moving bathysphere. You can't buy newspapers or watch TV in real time. Occasionally, as you fall into your seat on a plane hop from Dallas to Columbus, Ohio, wanly clutching a boxed panini, you catch a glimpse of a familiar large, frosted head in the first-class section that's rumored to belong to the candidate. She doesn't come back much to visit the press, except for the odd bright-eyed moment of managed conviviality. One senses a moment of trepidation on the flight from Cleveland to Toledo: "I intend to do as well as I can on Tuesday and we will see what happens after that."

The Hillary coterie up front in the plane always includes the stylish brunette Huma Abedin, a.k.a. the "body person" who maintains the senator's power wardrobe and unfailingly fresh appearance. Sometimes the candidate is joined by friends and endorsers. Ted Danson and his wife, Mary Steenburgen, show up for some Ohio gigs and are surprisingly effective, especially Steenburgen: "I looked at my friend Bill 30 years ago and I thought, If there is anything inherently healthy in the universe, you should be president one day. And I looked at Hillary and thought, 'Wow, do I dare to dream?' " Chelsea, Hillary's no-longer-secret weapon, joins the flight on the eve of Election Day, visibly lifting her mother's mood. The warmth and complicity between them is evident as they crack open a bottle of wine and squeeze hands together in the first-class cabin. Chelsea, 28, is all soft power to her mother's pre-emptive strike. There is steel beneath Chelsea's girlish charm.

The grueling, brutal pace Hillary maintains (14 cities in four days) even sets a pace for the younger Senator Obama. Perhaps she deserves to prevail simply because she's tougher—tougher than the media following ashen-faced in her wake, and clearly tougher than the other Democratic and Republican candidates who've already gone down in flames. Let no one dispute the grit of a woman willing to get up at 4 a.m. on a Monday in time to deliver doughnuts to workers on a shift change at the Chrysler plant in Toledo. Refreshed by the excursion, she then summons the bleary-eyed reporters and camera crews down to an impromptu "press avail" in the hotel lobby, where she coolly defenestrates Obama on his economic adviser's "wink wink" double-speak about NAFTA. Back on the plane a photographer pins up a sign over his seat: DON'T CALL ME AT 3 A.M.

The press will always feel Hillary's fierce, historic mistrust—and who can blame her? ABC's Kate Snow tells me that members of the public often bear down on her when they see her TV mike, cursing her out as a stand-in for Tim Russert, even though he is at NBC. "They feel we're the people taking her down," she said.

Perhaps this explains the Clinton advance team's puzzling decision, discovered when we arrived in Austin, Texas, on Monday afternoon, to have the press file from a men's locker room. Laptops were set up cheek by jowl with a wall of urinals, prompting raucous cries of: "Now we really know this campaign is in the toilet!" Reporters were supposed to view Hillary's electronic town hall with 800 Texas voters on an overhead TV monitor via Fox Sports Southwest—a curious choice of outlet based, apparently, on the cheapness of the media buy. (Or maybe it was a cunning strategy to alienate male voters expecting a Houston Astros spring-training game.)

As we awaited the town hall, we could look up at the overhead TV with the sound off. CNN's Wolf Blitzer was standing in front of a map, informing Americans of something—what? Then came images of an exhortatory Barack Obama. There was a rumor flying around out there that thousands of people were attending his rallies. How could this be when we on the Solutions for America campaign knew Hillary Clinton was going to win?

Here's the good part about the meta-madness of living in the campaign bubble. Sitting on the press bus learning nothing makes you especially receptive, when you get off at a pit stop, to learning everything—to feeling with heightened keenness the raw charge of churning humanity, unfiltered through polls and belligerent media noise. It allows you, finally, to see the candidate through the voters' eyes, and to realize how resolutely effective, how inspiringly pedestrian Hillary Clinton is.