Once, at a signing ceremony for a greenhouse-gas-emissions law, when the president inadvertently referred to “hair pollution” instead of “air pollution,” my eyes landed on the journalist’s, and I had to look away and bite my tongue. What I appreciate about her is the blazing, undeniable intelligence that manifests itself in her ability, in our conversations, to recall minutiae from a transportation bill I sponsored in the Senate, or a 1994 speech I gave in Stockholm as First Lady in her observations, appearing in her articles, of the perfect colorful detail from a state fair or pancake breakfast that I myself, sitting amidst it, missed and in her snapping, spontaneous sense of humor. She has, starting in 1992, interviewed me several dozen times-she was at the San Francisco Chronicle when I met her, then moved to The Washington Post, and for the last eight years has been at The New York Times-and while we aren’t friends, she reminds me of a neighbor or cousin we didn’t exactly choose each other, but we are ineluctably part of each other’s lives. The journalist was born in 1964, which is to say she’s seventeen years younger than I am. It is a fictional first person account of the night Hillary Clinton became the presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention. This short story was originally published in Esquire.
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