The gray lady may be down but she’s not out – yet. Hillary Clinton’s is a ship born of iron-y.

The once presumptive presidential nominee is no longer the sure win, her ship wrecked by an unforeseen storm – Barack Obama. Caught in a Bermuda Triangle of sorts, where the laws of physics have turned topsy-turvy, where what should have been wasn’t, what was isn’t, and who knows if what might have been will be.

Spinning in the vortex of this Devils’ Triangle, the Gulf Stream waters no longer a Florida straight, the gray lady fights the whirling dervish clinging for her political life.

How has it come to this? she cries, as she treads the menacing gray waters, marveling at her unfamiliar tears. The iron lady had built her entire candidacy on her toughness, only to discover as her political future flashed before her eyes the irony that what the people wanted from her was not the iron lady after all, but a woman of tears.

And her vote on the Iraq War…how unfair, she thought watching the sharks encircle her. How could she lose to a man who “voted” AGAINST a war, when she, a woman, voted FOR a war!  Who ever heard of a commander-in-chief voting against a war!

Hillary looked to the heavens waiting for an answer. None came, only more irony. When did inexperience trump experience? she shouted. For all of her life she had worked tirelessly, fought for children’s rights, championed the little guy, followed Bill to Little Rock, Arkansas, gotten him elected first governor and then president and patiently waited her turn.

Poor Hillary, always waiting, always the woman behind the man; she’d swallowed her pride and endured his affairs. Her time would come, she’d told herself. And what’s a little testosterone run amuck, anyway.

But now, irony of irony, testosterone has gotten in the way again – HERS. In the skookumchuck of this political season Hillary has become the testosterone candidate, Barack Obama running an estrogen candidacy: lot’s of change, lot’s of hope, lot’s of dreams. Barack Obama  has nearly stolen the election talking to a nation of children all eager to listen, needing their mama’s assurance the world is going to be fine.

But here is the true irony. Barack Obama’s campaign is the one Hillary's should have been. It was the one that she and Bill had so brilliantly contrived to get him elected to the presidency. Obama is running on her idea!

At the thought, Hillary’s anger bubbles up from her soul. She looks around. The sharks are everywhere, but Hillary isn’t afraid. She has her weapon to scare them away. She laughs, that loud, boisterous cackle and shocked by the sound, the sharks stop circling. She cackles some more and soon the sharks are gone.

Thank goodness for her Mae West and all that testosterone, Hillary thinks as she begins to swim, long, hard breaststrokes. She is indefatigable. Soon she is out of the vortex and she continues to swim determined to reach the shore.

The next morning she awakens, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, the sand warm. Where is she? she wonders. And then she sees the palm trees swaying in the breeze and realizes she’s washed up on the Miami shores.

And she has an idea, the iron lady, does. She kisses the sand when she realizes her campaign isn’t over yet. Never mind Texas, she knew she’d win Ohio, and now there is, of course, Florida. Florida, Florida, Florida and all those wonderful little cotton-headed voters…they'll put her over the top, she the gray lady down.

Hillary Clinton stands up and dusts off her ragged pant suit thinking as she does just how ironic it will be if Florida saves her! The Republican Party will go nuts, and, maybe Al Gore, too, the little so-and-so who wouldn’t give her an endorsement even after she’d given him a career.

Hillary smiles. It is a new day, and she cackles all the way up the beach loving every minute of it.