For your political trivia file:
I was struck by this passage in today’s NYT story about the Secretary of State:
While their underlings at times grouse about one another — some Clinton supporters call White House officials “The Cardinals” (to suggest that they are too controlling), and some Obama staff members refer to the State Department as “Hillaryland” (the campaign’s leftover name for the enemy camp) — Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton both have compelling reasons to make their relationship work.
In fact, “Hillaryland” goes back much, much farther than the 2008 campaign. Back when I covered the White House in the late 1990s, it was how the then-First Lady’s tight-knit staff referred to itself. I once asked Hillary Clinton spokesman Neel Lattimore where this rather odd nickname originated, and he said it actually began as sort of a joke during the 1992 campaign. As he recalled it, back in the Little Rock headquarters, Hillary Clinton’s operation put up a sign designating its part of the workspace as “Hillaryland,” and Mrs. Gore’s responded by marking its territory as “Tippertown.”