Dick Morris, a former Bill Clinton adviser who resigned amid allegations of a relationship with a prostitute and then wrote the anti-Hillary Rewriting History, has claimed that Hillary Clinton, after being elected, will asked to be called Hillary Rodham, her maiden name.

He seems pretty certain:

“I’ll bet you that if she wins, that’s what she has people call her.”

I’m incredibly skeptical of this. For one, Morris has an immense interest in trash-talking the Clintons after writing books criticizing them. He doesn’t have the rational, maybe-I’m-wrong tone people ought to have when they make predictions:

“It’s one of these Hillary lies…When she learned that Bill had been with Monica [Lewinsky] ’cause of the stain on the dress, she had to pretend that she didn’t know a year earlier when he told her, so she could defend having called it a vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Now, I’m certainly no Hillary fan, and it’s well established she’s a feminist. But she would lose an incredible amount of political cache if she used the Clinton name to get elected, then dumped it afterward. At that point she’d want a second term badly enough to calm her furthest-left notions, especially purely symbolic ones that do nothing to drive the U.S. toward socialism.

Right now it seems more likely to me that Morris is using this — an accusation that makes a little bit of sense on its face — to get back at the Clintons. Especially since he gives no indication of how he knows this well enough to outright predict it.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.