Dear Diary,
Yes, when we got out of the White House, we were dead broke. We had bills coming in from private school. We had at least two houses to buy. Plus those bi-weekly bikini waxes weren’t going to pay for themselves! (Ha, ha! I kid. It was monthly.) We were crawling out of a damn hole, people. It wasn’t until 2004-three long years after the White House!-that I made it into the top ten of the wealthiest members of the United States Senate. That was a slog, dear diary, a tough slog. I can’t count the number of posed photos I had to sit through, parties where I had to smile at sinecured sycophants, speeches I had to read to adoring audiences, plus random "gifts" I nearly broke my neck trying to look the other way to avoid seeing! I sweated every dime, and I’m not even counting all the effort I spent signing and depositing checks while the accountant was on vacation. (Seems like every other check was written in Indonesian, too, and that slows things down, let me tell you. The only word I know in that language is "payback" which, fortunately, came up a lot.)
Life after the White House was difficult. Apparently–and this was a shock to me, a real, honest-to-goodness shock–most people are expected to buy their own houses instead of just living in one somebody loans them in exchange for whatever ambassadorships or favors you can toss them while you’re in office. (I mean, whether you’re a Democrat or a Re-THUG-lican, you know how that works, am I right?) Plus there’s this special kind of loan you have to get called a "mortgage" for those rare times you don’t have the full two million in your checking account. As I said, we really were down to eating our caviar with white beans.
Testy little lunch with Elizabeth Warren yesterday. Was trying to get her to understand that sometimes–rarely, but sometimes–the decisions we make turn out to be wrong. She was having none of it, insisting that her insights as 1/64th American Indian enable her to see the future, rendering her infallible. Put down the peace pipe, Liz! I wrapped it up this way: "Lizzy, bubeleh, it’s okay if we’re wrong. All that matters is that our intentions sound good." It’s what I call the "CNN Standard." Wrapped up a lovely free-range meal with grain-free, gluten-free, vegan tiramisu prepared by an amputee, LGBTQ Palestinian immigrant working in a kitchen made entirely of stones carried no more than one mile from where they were found. (Eat local!) We returned to the limos in a spirited debate over which is more politically advantageous just now, to be gay, black, or bi. You already know how I feel about it, dear diary, but Lizzy said she’d go gay, black AND bi if it meant she didn’t have to fly commercial.
Good point, Chief Lizzy. Good, good point!
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The Super-Top-Secret, Extra-Personal Campaign Diary of Hillary Rodham Clinton is stolen each week by Lari Vine, the nom de guerre of an obscure playwright and screenwriter living in Washington DC. This diary is made possible by a grant from The New York Times, whose editors now believe that when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.
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