Posted on 08/17/2002 9:15:18 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
Once again, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has assured the nation that she won't be making a White House bid in 2004 - sort of.
"I have no plans to run for president," she told the Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday, for a story that confirmed in every other respect her plans to run in 2008.
In fact, her "no plans" in 2004 announcement leaves plenty of wiggle room. And even the planning denial seems in doubt given Mrs. Clinton's activities of recent months; a veritable frenzy of presidential positioning that would likely be wasted on race most observers insist is still six years away.
Just since the spring, for instance, New York's junior senator has managed to position herself as her party's most prominent Bush critic, with her every utterance on White House matters both domestic and international garnering widespread coverage.
Meanwhile behind the scenes, Mrs. Clinton has doled out $600,000 to fellow Democrats from her HILLPAC fundraising juggernaut in a bid to retake control of Congress.
The financial favors will need to be repaid, of course, with the currency of choice likely to be presidential endorsements the moment she needs them. Political favors of this sort are best redeemed when the obligation is still fresh.
At the same time, former Clinton White staffers have launched a parallel campaign to retake Congress with an eye towards Bush's eventual impeachment.
Then last month, like a bolt out of the blue, Hillary put in a crowd-wowing appearance at New York's Democratic Leadership Council presidential candidate forum, the same event that launched her husband's national campaign in 1991.
Back then, Bill Clinton was also staunchly maintaining that he didn't have any "plans" to run for president either, at least that's what he told his Arkansas constituents - and even key media allies who endorsed his last gubernatorial run in Nov. 1990 on the condition that he served out his full term.
One was the late John Robert Starr, then-managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
"He begged for my support in his sixth race for governor on the grounds that his education program would die if he were not in office to protect it," Starr recalled in a 1998 column. "I made him promise not only that he'd not run for president, but that he'd stay in Little Rock and do the work of the governor."
During one campaign debate, Clinton was asked if he would take the pledge not to run for the White House in 1992. "You bet!" the soon-to-be presidential candidate shot back.
Such a public denial deeply worried top Clinton aides at the time.
"You're not going to like this," campaign staffer Gloria Cabe warned Frank Greer, the Washington media consultant whom Clinton had recruited in preparation for his national run. "Clinton just took himself out of the '92 race," she told him.
Greer later told Clinton biographer David Maraniss that he was devastated at the news. "I died a thousand deaths. I though perhaps (the White House run) wasn't going to happen."
But on May 6, just six months after he took the pledge, the non-candidate showed up at the Democratic Leadership Council convention in Cleveland. He delivered a stirring address on national themes that left no doubt about his intentions.
"The buzz in Washington.... was that the Cleveland speech had established Clinton as a serious national figure who seemed to have a clear idea of what he wanted to do as president," Maraniss observed.
(In fact, it was two days later where Clinton revealed what he really wanted to do once he got to the White House, just before he gave a speech to the Governor's Quality Conference at Little Rock's Excelsior hotel, where a young woman named Paula Corbin - later Jones - just happened to be working.)
In September 1991, less than ten months after he gave his word both publicly and privately that he wasn't running, Clinton officially announced his presidential bid.
If she follows her husband's example, Mrs. Clinton will be denying she has any intention of making a 2004 White House run for at least another year - before bowing to "unforseen circumstances."
They're gonna have a tough time finding a crime that rises to the level of impeachment - and wasn't already commited by Clinton. I can't think of any, myself.
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