Letterman Gets Serious With Clinton

Some Light Moments, But Emphasis In "Late Show" Interview On Iraq And Campaign 2008

(CBS)  David Letterman marked his 14th anniversary at CBS Thursday with stars including Willie Nelson and Kenny Chesney, joking at one point that he'd had to leave NBC "after that men's room incident" - a reference to the Capitol Hill scandal Idaho Sen. Larry Craig's guilty plea in a Minneapolis airport restroom.

That was just a warm-up for the main event, however.

Letterman's headliner was Hillary Clinton, who walked onto the "Late Show" stage to the strains of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run," ribbed Letterman for his many jokes about her pantsuits (while wearing one, of course), and answered some serious questions before delivering a Top Ten list of comedic campaign promises.

Most popular with the "Late Show" audience were a promise to allow taxpayers to roll dice for double or nothing against the IRS; a pledge to loan out Air Force One to folks who have trouble getting a flight; and a promise that her vice president "will never shoot anybody in the face."

Letterman took Clinton back to her first job after graduating from college, as a fish gutter in Alaska.

"The job was to be in hip boots with an apron, with a spoon," Clinton recalled. "The salmon would be brought in, they'd be slit open, and the caviar would be taken out and then they'd be thrown in a big pile. My job was to grab - I mean, these are big fish - to take a spoon and clean out the insides. That's called 'sliming fish.' "

It was, Clinton said satirically, "the best preparation for being in Washington that you can possibly imagine."

Asked about the tens of millions she's already raised for her campaign, and the many millions more that are likely to be spent, Clinton said she'd like to see a switch to "public financing, where people don't have to raise money like this."

"There's a great public financing system here in New York City, and I think it's a terrific model," she continued. "But, again, under our constitution, the Supreme Court has decided that your contributions is a form of political speech... So it would be very hard to come up with a system that would really work. But I'm gonna do everything I can - now, as a senator - I hope, as a president - to try to deal with it."

As for the campaign itself, the New York Democrat says it's long, intense, and takes stamina - which she has.

"I find it exhilarating," said Clinton. "I get to travel, go in and out of people's lives in a way that few folks ever get to do. You're in people's homes, workplaces - everything that you can imagine that's important, and they're telling you about it."

The campaign trail, she acknowledged, is also "incredibly draining... it seems to be what our system demands. Maybe because it's the hardest job in the world, they want to make the candidates go through very tough preliminaries."

The challenges are already in place, said Clinton, for the next president.

"I think it's going to be especially hard following President Bush and Vice President Cheney; I think there are going to be a lot of problems that we'll inherit," she said. "I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think, number one, that I could win, and number two, that I could do the job that the country needs."

"I think the fact that I would be the first woman president is a good barrier for America to break," she continued, pointing to female leaders past and present, including Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, Golda Meyer, and Angela Merkel. "We're the land where we say to everybody, 'Live up to your potential, live your dreams,' right?"

"It certainly seems overdue," Letterman said about the prospect of a female president.