Hillary Clinton’s run for her money

The 2008 campaign has been a rude awakening for Senator Hillary Clinton, whose dreams of being the first woman president have become nightmares, leading to forced sleep metaphors. Originally, she was just the woman the Democrats needed: a tough old broad who’d do anything to get elected. But then a noble African-American entered the race and noble African-Americans always defeat tough old broads, as codified by the landmark Supreme Court case Driver v. Miss Daisy. Yet Clinton continues campaigning with the frantic intensity of a burglar hoping the police won’t notice the stolen VCR he’s holding if he just keeps talking. Why? She’s too deep in debt to stop.

Running for president is pricey. Overhead costs like office space, phone bills and handguns; voter giveaways like buttons, bumper stickers and human hair; and don’t forget X-ray glasses and tigers, standard political equipment since 1964. These add up to massive bills. Clinton tried cutting gas costs by using teleportation pods, but that resulted in the need for expensive surgery after misuse of the pod temporarily left her with the arm of a housefly. The largest single expenditure was an expedition to locate Sasquatch, the rarest democratic superdelegate. Unfortunately, once discovered he supported Obama. 

Now, like money spent at a strip club, Clinton has nothing left to show for her wasted campaign cash aside from a vaguely queasy sense that she’s done something very wrong and everybody knows it. In this case, she owes $20 million worth of wrong, which is a lot. We’re talking 1996 Jim Carrey money here. Clinton assumed she’d be okay since all president-elects are given a blank check from George Washington’s bank account, but now she isn’t going to be president, and those bills are starting to come due.

Luckily, she can still recoup that dough by cutting a deal. In light of her recent primary win, I bet that in exchange for dropping out, President Obama would name her God-Queen of West Virginia. Once in control of its valuable deposits of salt and bituminous coal, she can easily repay her creditors, with enough left over to transform Marshall University into a lavish winter palace where she can luxuriate to the serenades of her court’s Appalachian fiddlers. Plus, she’ll be making history, as not just West Virginia’s first female ruler-deity, but West Virginia’s first ruler-deity of any kind. Hopefully that will be enough to shut her up.

Elliott Kalan is a producer for the “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”