Driving Miss Hillary 

• John Kilbourn

Hillary will be 69 in 2016, younger than Reagan was when he was elected and several years younger than the doddering John McCain when he ran for president in 2008. Hillary seems about 20 years younger than her rapidly aging husband, who now spends time clipping coupons, playing bingo and battling constipation. So, Hillary has plenty of time to lie low, keep her head down and be a good soldier in the Obama administration, biding her time until 2016.

Pundits and prognosticators are already projecting a 2012 Dream Team of Obama/Clinton, predicting that smilin’ Joe Biden will slip quietly from the scene, glad to exchange his constricting neckties for a comfy cardigan, content to whittle wood under the magnolias.

But still-bitter Hillarians are urging her to challenge Obama Man in the next election. To hell with 2016—Hillary is tanned, rested and ready to rumble right now. Her approval numbers are practically double those of the beleaguered commander-in-chief. Already, a commercial has appeared in major media outlets lauding the life of Hillary while patriotic music surges to a climax. The commercial ends with an excessively Photoshopped picture of Hillary looking weirdly like old-time movie star Celeste Holm.

Told you so, told you so, the Hillarians chant. Look at how Obama Man has screwed up. If Hillary had been elected, we wouldn’t still be in this fix. Well, who knows? But given the unmitigated mess handed Obama by Bush the Younger, it is unlikely anyone could have done anything better than Obama, and probable that anyone else would have made the mess even worse.

Nevertheless, let’s imagine that somehow Hillary edged out Barack for the Democratic nomination, and then went on to thump senescent John and sexy Sarah in the general election. (Remember how it backfired when Ms. Palin tried to suck up to Hillary by asking, “Can I call you Grandma?”)

At her first press conference, in the middle of answering a question from Fox News about whether she is taking hormone-replacement pills—“Well, before I answer that, let me ask you if you’re glad to see me or did you just take a Viagra pill?”—Hillary’s hubby wanders into the East Room, attired in an old bathrobe and snacking on Doritos as he gives a tour of the White House to Carla Bruni, wife of that French Sarkozy fella.

“Don’t mind Bill,” President Hillary says, “he seems to think he used to live here.”

The question about hormone-replacement therapy is just the first outrage. A week into her term, Glenn Beck goes on the Fox News morning show and tells the co-hosts he is convinced President Hillary “has a deep-seated hatred of men.” A few days later, Elder Beck goes to his trademark blackboard on his TV show and feverishly scribbles diagrams of female and male naughty bits, and in a cloud of chalk dust, stares sincerely into the camera and announces that Hillary is a “Sapphic sister, or in the lingo of the liberal media, a lesbian gay lady.”

Within weeks, all 400 pounds of Rush Limbaugh has weighed in, working his ditto-heads into a frenzy with suggestions that President Hillary is, in fact, not a lesbian but a transsexual. “Yes, ladies and gentleman,” El Rushbo intones, “I am in possession of documents that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hillary—by the way, isn’t Hillary really a man’s name?—had a sex-change operation in Guadalajara back in 1997, just after Bill was not having sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. My friends, if President Hillary passes her health-care bill, none of us will be safe from mandatory sex-change operations.”

Just before the 2010 midterm elections, a new scandal threatens the Hillary administration. A red-faced Bill Clinton is caught red-handed in the Lincoln bedroom with the 30-something leggy redheaded wife of Hillary’s vice president, the 60-something pinko Dennis Kucinich.

Facing defeat in 2012, President Hillary bans Bill from the White House, kicks Kucinich off the ticket and names her limo driver, a guy named Barack Obama, her new vice president.