Opinion: Hillary Clinton likens White House to prison
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Not that it’s going to diminish her ambition to live there again, but Hillary Clinton says she views the White House as something of a prison.
She also thinks that when she gets there, she’ll have to have some kind of national contest to decide what to call her husband because First Lady wouldn’t be appropriate.
This and other minutiae Clinton shared with Tyra Banks during a Monday taping of her syndicated TV show that will be broadcast nationally Friday.
‘Do you ever get lonely?’ Banks asked the New York senator. ‘Do you ever sit in your room by yourself sometimes and just feel alone?’....
‘I don’t feel lonely,’ Clinton said. ‘But I do feel sometimes isolated. Because when you are in these positions that I have been in, it can be very isolating. It is one of the reasons I put on the dark glasses and the baseball cap and go out of the White House. President Harry Truman once said that the White House was like the crown jewel of the American penal system because you can feel confined.’
‘And kind of jails,’ Banks added.
‘Yeah,’ Clinton replied. ‘Because you feel so set off and really isolated.’
Banks also wanted to know what Clinton’s husband would be called if she won. ‘He will always be Mr. President,’ Clinton said. ‘But now we need to do a nationwide contest for a name.’
‘Like a reality show,’ Banks suggested.
‘Like a reality show,’ Clinton agreed. ‘This is good, because think about it; here are some of the things that have been suggested like First Mate. His Scottish friends say ‘First Laddie,’ but we need ideas. I’ll just keep calling him Bill.’
Banks didn’t get around to asking policy questions, but she was curious about something that so many of us have also long wondered about -- which reality show Clinton might like to be on someday -- ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ ‘American Idol’ or ‘America’s Next Top Model.’
‘In my dreams,’ Clinton said, ‘I would be on ‘America’s Next Top Model,’ but in reality I would have to chose my limited talents and of them, dancing is better than singing. You do not want me to sing.’
‘What type of dancing do you do? Do you do hip-hop? Can you do the Soulja Boy or the Spongebob dance?’
‘I have heard of those,’ Clinton said. ‘I think that is a variation of what I did like 30, 40 years ago.’
‘My mother says the same thing.’
Finally, Clinton announced her decision: ‘I think it would have to be ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ ‘ she said, ‘especially if I could have one of those really good partners.’
-- Andrew Malcolm