Hillary Clinton's non-campaign for president

The line outside the Manhattan Barnes & Noble began forming overnight, and by early morning it wrapped around the corner, down the block, around another corner, most of the way down that block, and finally ended near a service entrance where a sizable security detail waited. A sparkling tour bus festooned with slogans idled as volunteers waved placards and dispensed rolls of stickers to the crowd. Dozens of reporters, gawkers, and a curbside vendor hawking unlicensed promotional wares clogged the sidewalk, jockeying for space.

The occasion: Hillary Clinton, author, was in town to sign some books.

Clinton is not a presidential candidate, fanfare be damned. Despite a barnstorming media blitz to promote her new book, Hard Choices, and despite the book itself reading as something of a campaign manifesto, the former secretary of State still insists, with a wink, that she's not sure whether she wants to be president.

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There is roughly one reason Clinton would not want to run for president: Campaigning is arduous and nasty. The reasons why she would get in the game, by contrast, are so multitudinous that to expound on them in detail would require enough space to rival the 656-page, 2.4-pound memoir she was settling in to sign Tuesday in New York.

Still, the mass of supporters who packed Barnes & Noble — the bookstore estimated the crowd at around 1,000 — typically offered the same response when asked why they waited in line for hours just to get a fleeting face-to-face with Clinton and her autograph, first name only.

Florence Wozar, a New Yorker who supported Clinton in 2008, said she'd met the former first lady three times before, but dropped by for a fourth meeting "to show my support and encourage her to run." Nell Blumel, in town from Florida to see her granddaughter-in-law, said she hoped the throng would push Clinton to get in the race and "break the glass ceiling."

Others gushed, in general terms, about Clinton's experience, trustworthiness, and record. Few cited the book itself, though one person did — if only to note it would be "cool" to have a potential president's autograph.

But again, this was merely a book tour, and nothing more. So like any tour promoting a memoir described by critics as "mumbo-jumbo," "mush," "contrived," and "50 shades of boring," this one was being trailed by a giant bus plastered with the author's face and carrying her most ardent proselytizers.

(Jon Terbush / The Week)

Ready for Hillary, a Super PAC that has already taken in more than $5.7 million and amassed a list of two million potential supporters, is using the bus to raise awareness about Clinton's non-literary accomplishments. "With all of the fans and supporters she has across the country, it was important to give them a place to go," Seth Bringman, Ready for Hillary's communications director, said of the group's genesis.

Clinton, he added, was "someone who hasn't even decided if she's going to run or not." So after trailing the book tour around the country like a diesel-fueled hype man, The Hillary Bus will pop up at state fairs, concerts, and college campuses this year to keep prodding the "potential candidate," as Bringman put it, to run.

"Potential candidate" is the operative phrase, of course. Clinton is ever-mindful of the missteps that doomed her 2008 campaign, when a prolonged air of inevitability morphed, with the help of Team Obama, into an air of establishment elitism. With room to her left, Clinton could meet the same fate again in 2016, should she choose to run.

"She's coming out of the box a little early," Gary Novak, who works in real estate, said on his way to work. And this time, he warned, she would be unable "to out-distance the knowledge curve, because most Americans now know she's just part of the establishment, playing this populist game."

A scenario Hillary would do well to keep in mind.