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As players on both sides wait it out, Clinton is quiet about '08

Ellis Henican

May 5, 2006

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Hillary is still being coy.

She's not even thinking about running for president in 2008, she swears - not until she gets herself re-elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

Of course, nobody believes that old dodge.

Not the Democratic Party operatives who are furiously scheming her return to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

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Not the muscular Hillary-haters who are already planting little stink bombs in her way.

Not even Bob Kunst.

Kunst comes off a bit eccentric. But you can't fault his focus. Since August of 2003, without a lick of encouragement from the Clinton inner circle, he's been driving around the country from his home in Miami Beach, "drafting" Hillary for president.

Not that she'll require any gale-force winds when she's ready to announce.

"We've done 123 cities already," Kunst was saying yesterday. "Four TV ads, 742 interviews, collected 15,000 signatures. Thousands of buttons and stickers, and now Hillary gingerbread cookies, too."

All drafting a woman who appears almost certain to run anyway. Just not yet.

Kunst has now scheduled an official national launch for his Hillarynow.com. It's May 23 at the Enchanted Gingerbread Coffee Shop in Nashville's Germantown neighborhood. He gives the modest setting a broad, conceptual sweep.

"We're going where we're least expected," Kunst said. "The home of country music, NASCAR-land. There's no reason she can't get votes in places like this."

To be sure, Hillary has some pre-cooked advantages in her inevitable race for the presidency, being the front-runner for the Democratic nomination and all. Money's no problem. Her husband's lingering approval ratings, still sky-high, don't hurt, either. And who else in American politics is so instantly identifiable by a single first name?

Her reservoir of public support is matched only by her equally deep reservoir of public loathing. With her it is ever thus.

Even her harshest critics - the smart ones, anyway - are beginning to recognize the strength of her all-but-inevitable candidacy.

"The qualities that made Hillary Clinton such a problematic presidential spouse may also make her just the kind of woman people feel they can trust with the presidency," conservative commentator John Podhoretz writes in his new book, "Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be The Next President of the United States Unless ..." which appears next week. "Namely, she has created an image of herself as unfeminine, an image that connects her to the successful female chief executives in other countries."

Think Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir.

Even her legendary personal rigidity, Podhoretz concedes, might actually help her politically. "She gains from displaying her hard edge, her cold quality, to neutralize whatever negatives there might be as a result of her gender," Podhoretz writes.

For her part, Hillary refuses to react to any such psychoanalyzing. Same as she's been downright standoffish toward Kunst's energetic aid.

She just barrels ahead. No atta-boys from Harold Ickes to Kunst's house in Miami. No 305 speed-dial on Bill C's cell phone.

Which, if anything, seems only to encourage the faithful Kunst.

"She keeps saying she has to get re-elected first in New York," he conceded. "But look. She has $20 million in the bank. She's 25 points ahead of anyone. All our carrying on hasn't hurt her one iota."

As long as it takes, he vows, he'll keep doing what he's doing now: standing behind tables outside political meetings in the strangest of places. Passing out his Hillarynow.com bumper stickers and pins. Offering plates of chocolate-chip cookies made from Hillary's famous recipe.

"We've done all this on 35 grand," Bob Kunst said. "If these professional politicians around Hillary would just pay attention, they could hire us to do their public relations. We'd be a tremendous bargain for them. She has Washington already. She needs the grassroots energy."

And oddly, the hostility too.