On 3 AM Phone Calls, Or, A Fake Consultant Advises Hillary

As so many of us discover, late nights are the best time to do any serious writing that has piled up during the day. No meetings to attend, no phone calls to interrupt the flow…and most importantly, nobody else’s fires to put out.

And sure enough, there I was, working away, when the phone rang.

I knew who it was going to be…Hillary.
After all, she’s the only one who ever calls me at 3 AM.

She sounded like she’d been drinking…and not Mimosas either. Her voice had that angry edge, like it did the time she called up and told me about the photographs from that night Bill and Chris and that guy from “The West Wing” were partying at The Bulldog.

She’d been hitting the mescal hard last night as the Mississippi results were coming in, she told me, and before she called she’d already put four bullets into the poster-sized photograph of Monica Lewinsky she keeps inside the garage door—and everyone who knows her knows Gusano Rojo makes Hillary even more mean than usual.

I could hear the crunching of the worm between her teeth as she fired another round into the poster…

“I told you I could stay in this race” she hissed at me through the phone. The gun went off again. She usually keeps 13 in the clip…it’s a superstition, I’m told. Seven more to go until she reloads.

She’s been pissed at me ever since I predicted a year ago that she would never be elected President…and especially since I recently suggested to her that she would be better off going back to the Senate and living off the graft Bill’s been bringing in with his “Presidential Library” money. She’d fired off at least two clips that night—and I heard she had to have a new Monica and a new garage door installed the next day.

“I know you can stay in” I tell her, “but you’ll never win…especially not the way you’re hitting Obama with any lame crap you and Wolfson and the rest of that crazy-ass crew over there can fake up. It’s killing any “change” credibility you have left.”

“Of course I can” she screamed back: “look at Pennsylvania. I know places up there that are racist as hell. I can send Geraldine up there and they’ll love her. Indiana? They have quite a history with a former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan and their former Governor. They’ll love me there. West Virginia? Need I even go on?”

Boom! Boom!
Two more shots.
“Right in the eye. How you like that, Monica?” the voice came down the line.

“After that, I’m sending ‘Obama in Somali clothing’ bobbleheads to all the Superdelegates…and I want to talk to you about an ad idea I had…”

“Really?” My eyebrows were arching at this point, because this is where I really earn my money…and being the only honest voice she ever hears is becoming a nice piece of my fake income this cycle.

“Here it is.
I think it makes the '3 AM' ad look like Sesame Street, but tell me what you think.

Picture a school bus, on a beautiful sunny day, all the kids singing songs…and all of a sudden black vans surround the bus. After it stops, masked men in Arabic clothing storm the bus, screaming “Death to America”. Then they load the bus up with explosives, all the while shouting ‘jihad, jihad’. Then they drive away in the bus, filled with terrorists and explosives and the terrified children.

The bus crashes through the gates of a nuclear power plant, terrorists firing their machine guns the entire time…and before anyone can stop them, the bus full of children and explosives is heading straight into the reactor building, with nothing to stop it.

At the last second the camera reveals the driver, who takes off his mask just before the bus bomb causes the reactor to explode…and that’s when we discover the driver is a smiling Barack Obama.

The graphic comes up as the mushroom cloud goes off:

‘Barack Hussein Obama.
Can we trust him with our kids?”

“What do I think?”
“Exactly.”

“I think you need to get out of the race this second, Hillary. I think you need to fire Mark and Howard so they can go out and start a Fight Club somewhere…and I think you and Chris need to seriously think about an afternoon at The Bulldog.”

Boom! Boom!
“Suck lead, bitch!”

Three shots left.

“The thing is, Hillary, the longer you stay at this the worse it gets. Look, the last time you went negative you lost 11 in a row…and after Mississippi and Wyoming that means at least a few more losses ahead…and the “entitlement” thing is getting more and more threadbare every day…and even Oprah’s finally turned against you.

Oprah, Hillary.
You actually managed to alienate Oprah.
Do you realize how far you’ve fallen?
Do you realize that at this moment Oprah respects Steadman more than you?”

Boom! Boom! Boom! Crash!
Click. Click.

My guess: three shots, she threw the empty bottle at “Monica”…and then she jacked in a new clip.

“But Hillary, here’s a bigger question. Obama has changed the game by bringing in all these new voters that have, in the past, distrusted the process. What you’re doing right now means that they may vote for Obama, but they’ll never become Democrats.

Now if you lose you’re going back to the Senate…but if those new voters become real Democrats, they’ll vote for Democratic candidates besides Obama in every state, cycle after cycle…including you… and you could quickly find yourself in a Senate with 60 Democrats.

The Senate has no term limits, unlike the Presidency.
That means you could find yourself facing one of two possible futures:

Would you rather be reelected, over and over, as a popular Senator, even having a shot at Majority Leader…or would you rather go down in history as the “Ralph Nader” of 2008?

You know which one John McCain hopes you choose, right?

You want my advice? Being willing to say or do anything to achieve a momentary victory is no victory at all…and the more that ugly side of you becomes known to the people you want to rule, the less they’ll want you as their ruler.

Now put the gun away, stop buying mescal, switch back to the Bailey’s…drop out of the race…and hire yourself a really great looking handyman to fix the garage door. Maybe even two.

And have them come over the weekend you send Bill to Pittsburgh.
I won’t tell if you don’t.

And for God’s sake quit chewing on that worm.
It’s really annoying.

I’ll send a bill for the consult in the morning.
Now go to bed…and when you wake up, end this mess.”

And with that, the phone went dead.
But as she was hanging up I could hear her voice, amused, saying: “I do need a new door…”