Hillary Clinton, who's claimed fandom for both the Chicago Cubs and New York Yankees in her political life, told Access Hollywood in an interview Tuesday that she wants to see the Cubs in the World Series.
"If you're commander-in-chief, can you place an executive order to make sure that the Cubs finally win the World Series and end the Curse of the Billy Goat?" Access host Kit Hoover asked. "Can we do this?"
"I hope so," Clinton said, smiling. "I'm really researching this, because it would be ideal if I were the nominee for this to happen in 2016. Wouldn't that be the best?"
"The best," Hoover said.
"But it would be a dream to have the Cubs in the World Series, and regardless of whether I'm in the White House or not, to try to get a seat to be there in the bleachers and cheer them on," she said.
Clinton's pandering to New York fans while she was still first lady and mulling a run for the U.S. Senate was controversial even then. A 1999 New York Times article refers to a "classic Clintonian gesture" for her claiming loyalty to both storied franchises, even though she was born and raised in Chicago:
If Hillary Rodham Clinton was looking for a way to get under Rudolph W. Giuliani's skin, she may have found it today. She claimed lifelong allegiance to the New York Yankees, the Mayor's hometown team; pulled a Yankees cap over her hair, and used the power of her out-of-town address to pose with the Bronx Bombers on her own turf.
''The fact is, I've always been a Yankees fan,'' the First Lady, who was born and bred in Chicago, asserted this morning to Katie Couric on NBC's ''Today Show'' in anticipation of the championship team's visit to the White House this evening. When the puzzled Ms. Couric said she thought Mrs. Clinton was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, the First Lady, in a classic Clintonian gesture, quickly claimed loyalty to the Cubs, too.
''I am a Cubs fan,'' said Mrs. Clinton, who threw out the first pitch at Wrigley Field in Chicago on opening day in 1994. ''But I needed an American League team because when you're from Chicago, you cannot root for both the Cubs and the Sox. I mean, there's a dividing line that you can't cross there. So as a young girl, I became very interested and enamored of the Yankees.''
Clinton ultimately ran and won a seat in the Senate in 2000, and she was re-elected in 2006. She could conceivably have it both ways and one day see the Cubs, a National League team, meet the Yankees, an American League one, in the Fall Classic.
The Yankees have swept the Cubs twice in the World Series, in 1932 and 1938. These meetings occurred shortly before Clinton was born, however.