Rice hones campaign skills but denies running

By Saul Hudson

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (Reuters) – Does U.S. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice want to be president? Even a young girl
at a photo opportunity with Rice in her former elementary
school wanted the United States’ most prominent black
Republican to answer the question.

Rice, whose wide smile had been fixed on her face as the
10- and 11-year-olds asked her about growing up in the
segregated South and playing the piano, furrowed her brow and
narrowed her eyes for an uncomfortable moment.

Sitting on a knee-high chair in front of shelves of books
and teddy bears — and next to the Stars-and-Stripes flag
brought in for the occasion by her staff — she shot a nervous
look at the media invited to observe a three-day tour of her
home state.

Rice recovered her composure, laughed and turned on the
charm fit for a campaign trail, telling the pony-tailed, black
girls from Brunetta C. Hill school in Birmingham that they
could be president in a nation that has had neither a woman nor
a black commander-in-chief.

“I don’t want to run for office. I like what I’m doing,”
the highest-ranking black woman in U.S. government history
said.

The reply was a variation of a denial — that she was not
testing the waters for a 2008 presidential bid — which Rice
was obliged to make repeatedly on a trip saturated in public
relations and politics that ended on Sunday.

Former secretaries of state made no such extensive domestic
tours and Rice has usually travels outside Washington only to
deliver policy speeches in one-day outings.

Rice’s aides said the weekend trip with Britain’s Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw as her guest helped explain to Americans
how diplomacy works.

But voters in Republican Alabama were not buying it: a
foreign policy chief with tasks such as stopping Iraq from
imploding in civil war did not take time out for a hometown
tour unless she was building political capital, they said.

At a University of Alabama football game, where Rice waved
and smiled like a rock star in the center of the field to more
than 80,000 screaming fans, supporters in the home team’s
crimson colors debated when, not whether, she would run.

“She’s just here driving up votes for office,” Evelyn Casey
said, noting how the Bush administration needed to improve its
reputation in the South after criticism of its response to
Hurricane Katrina.

Bobby Cole interrupted his fellow fan as they shared beers
and burgers before the game to echo what some political
analysts say could be Rice’s more realistic ambition in 2008 —
to be vice president.

“She isn’t ready for president yet,” he said.

Straw was along simply to “help one of his buddies with her
political campaign,” Bob Thomas added.

DRAFT CONDI

As Rice’s motorcade of black SUVs with tinted windows sped
past, admirers shouted “2008″ and “Tell her to run for
president.”

That reflected sentiment found not just in Alabama but on
the Internet too, where there is a “Draft Condi” campaign
offering bumper stickers, T-shirts and baseball caps to “make
it happen” in 2008.

Several white men are favorites to win the Republican
nomination for 2008.

But Rice often refers to her color and could be a better
contender against Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is many Democrats’
choice to win back the White House, because of her popularity
among blacks and women.

“It’s Hillary’s candidacy that makes Condi’s necessary and,
therefore, likely,” Dick Morris a political consultant in the
Clinton administration said in excerpts of his new book “Condi
vs. Hillary.”

In Birmingham, speakers at a ceremony to remember the
racist killing of four schoolgirls at a segregated church,
hailed Alabama’s favorite daughter as the girl who out-slugged
the boys in street softball and grew up to be the most powerful
woman in the world.

Rice ended the day surprisingly ambiguous about her
political ambitions.

In an interview with the city’s newspaper, The Birmingham
News, Rice was again asked about running and she playfully left
the door open: “Now there’s a novel idea,” she said.