Senator Clinton Says No to '04, but Playfulness Hints at Yes
By JIM DWYER
hen the guests descended on the Clinton family home in Chappaqua on Sunday evening, most of them had already heard that the answer to the question was, roughly speaking, no, a thousand times no, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would not make a run for the presidency next year.
By the end of the night, "no" was not quite the word ringing in every ear as the guests — about 150 major campaign donors to the former president or to the senator — left the gathering. During cocktails in the back yard, one group heard former President Bill Clinton say that the national Democratic Party had "two stars": his wife, the junior senator from New York, and a retired general, Wesley K. Clark, who is said to be considering a run for the presidential nomination.
And during the dinner, according to a dozen people who were at the event, they heard Mrs. Clinton say how important their support would be "for my next campaign, whatever that may be." Later, Mr. Clinton, in discussing the presidential field, said, "We might have another candidate or two jumping into the race."
To John Catsimatidis, the chief executive officer of the Gristede's supermarket chain, those remarks shifted his own views of whether Mrs. Clinton had definitively ruled out the presidential race.
"I was sitting next to her last night, and I didn't get the impression that she had pulled the trigger in her mind" for or against a national campaign, Mr. Catsimatidis said. "Some people might have been left with the impression that there's always a possibility. I was."
To others at the party, Mrs. Clinton, in alluding pointedly to an unspecified campaign, was merely having mild fun about a candidacy that not only has never been announced but whose existence has repeatedly been denied.
"She clearly laughed after that — she was totally making a joke," said Lisa Perry, one of many guests who contacted The New York Times at the request of Mrs. Clinton's staff to douse whatever heat may have risen from the senator's words. "She was playing with the notion that everyone thinks she may."
Any other interpretation, say Senator Clinton and her aides, was a matter of wishful listening among eager political supporters. While they did not deny the remarks attributed to either of the Clintons, they said that these were casual comments, made about the need to raise funds for Mrs. Clinton's race for the Senate in 2006 — not about a run for president next year.
In a telephone interview, Mrs. Clinton said the entire focus of the evening was how to marshal forces against the as-yet unformed and anonymous opposition she will face when her Senate term expires in 2006.
"I try to be careful — but being careful was misunderstood, or misheard," she said.
Asked if it was impossible that she would run for president next year, she laughed. Asked again, she laughed again, then responded: "I have said I am not running. If I knew another foreign language, I'd say it in that. I'm saying, `I'm not going to do it.' "
One close ally of Mrs. Clinton, who asked not to be named, said that the people who took note of the remarks by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Clinton "were not hallucinating. In the climate of heightened interest in a candidacy, they know they need to be extra, extremely careful with their language. Still, you don't engage a possible presidential run with a casual remark at a dinner."
A Web site run by Mrs. Clinton's staff, FriendsofHillary.com, regularly includes e-mail messages urging her to run for president. The messages are selected and posted publicly by her staff.
When these received attention in the press last month, Mrs. Clinton promptly told The Associated Press, "I am absolutely ruling it out." Even so, the Hillary-for-president e-mail messages appeared on the campaign Web site yesterday.
Mrs. Clinton said she had been busy raising funds for Democrats around the country and needed to get money together to protect herself from the onslaught promised by the Republicans after the 2004 elections. For Sunday's dinner, the Clintons invited people who had raised $100,000 or more for the senator during the last year.
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