I love this piece. The right wing media has, for over a year, been stating that Hillary Clinton has plans to run for the presidency in 2004. Of course, its been hogwash from the very beginning, but its served a very useful propaganda purpose to the minions of uninformed conservatives who get their routine spin served from FOX News and other similar media sources:

Republicans for Hillary, Part 3
Retreat.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Nov. 14, 2003, at 4:27 PM PT

Hillary Clinton's under-the-radar presidential candidacy—which, as Chatterbox observed previously, was invented by conservative commentators to fulfill various practical and psychological imperatives and has no reality outside their imaginations—has ended. That's a relief! With the passage of time, the real Hillary Clinton's repeated denials that she was running for president in 2004 grew more and more plausible, putting the right in a real quandary. For awhile, the winger line (as laid down by Fox News) was that Hillary was waiting too long to file for the primaries, which only demonstrated that she didn't know the first thing about running a presidential campaign. How much nastier was this going to get? Chatterbox began to worry that Republicans would boycott her imaginary inauguration, and then (inevitably) would call for her make-believe impeachment. But New York Times columnist William Safire found a more graceful way to usher conservatives out of their collective psychosis.

According to Safire's construct, Hillary's presidential campaign suffered an unexpected and fatal blow on Nov. 7, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that nonfarm payroll employment had grown in October by 126,000. This, combined with the upward revision of the same figure for September, was immediately seized on by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and others as evidence that the "jobless" economic recovery was finally creating jobs. Previously, Safire explained (repeating some delusional analysis from an earlier column), Hillary had been using Wesley Clark as a stalking horse:

[L]et Dick Gephardt slow Dean down in Iowa, then push Clark hard enough to upset Dean in New Hampshire, or at least attract enough of the isolationist vote from Dean to let John Kerry squeak through. … f the national economy had gone south, Hillary would have gone South with Clark on her ticket to take on an unemployment-ravaged Bush herself. But with the economy surging and Democrats robbed of their central issue, Hillary can wait till 2008.