IT was the question on everybody’s lips, even those of a shy, nine-year-old schoolgirl in the heart of Alabama. Was Condoleezza Rice going to run for president? “I don’t want to,” the American secretary of state said gently. “I like what I am doing and I don’t want to run for office.”

Rice must have been wondering lately how many ways there are to say no, but speculation that she would not refuse an offer from her party to serve her country, at least as vice-president, continues to grow.

In Birmingham this weekend on a three-day visit to the Deep South with Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, Rice is being feted as a homecoming queen. It is by far the most personal tour she has ever undertaken.

A State Department official said there would be more “show America” visits with foreign dignitaries to other parts of the country. They could just as easily be billed as “show Condi to America” tours.

Rice, who has never run for anything — not even “high school president”, as she admitted last week — has been glad-handing locals from pupils at her old primary school to Hurricane Katrina relief volunteers and fans of the Crimson Tide, the Alabama University football team. When she entered Jim ’n’ Nick’s southern fried restaurant, diners applauded.

Yesterday Rice, 51, unveiled plaques in memory of four girls murdered in the Birmingham bombing of 1963 that killed her 11-year-old friend, Denise McNair. “I remember a place called Bombingham, where I witnessed the denial of democracy in America and where blacks were terrorised by rebel yells and nightriders,” she said.

Compared with the usual State Department business, the agenda for Rice’s visit was remarkably domestic, prompting Tory MPs in Britain to criticise Straw for using his office to boost her prospects.

“If you parse her words very carefully, she always says she is not interested in running for office,” said Charles Krauthammer, the conservative commentator. “She obviously doesn’t want to ‘run’ but if she was asked for the good of the (Republican) party, I think she would love to be president or vice-president.”

A group known as Americans for Rice has run two television advertisements urging her to run — and shown during the hit show Commander in Chief starring Geena Davis as the first woman president.

Yet the Alabama trip has already revealed several pitfalls for the secretary of state. In a speech to students at the Blackburn Institute in Tuscaloosa, named after John Blackburn, her father’s friend and mentor, Rice spoke about the struggle to bring freedom and civil rights to the segregated South of her childhood and about her impatience with “cynics” who argue that a people’s culture, race or religion — as in Iraq — made them unsuitable for democracy.

“If somebody was to say that about you, how would you feel about it?” she asked bluntly.

While the audience clearly respected her it was Straw, a seasoned political campaigner but hardly one of the great orators, who knew how to work the crowd before turning serious.

If Rice does stand for office, she could do with Straw as a warm-up artist. In the first five minutes, he had cracked several jokes about supporting the Crimson Tide — “I understand my duty” — and shunning orange, the colour of the University of Tennessee, its rival.

There were indications, too, that the opportunity to make history as America’s first woman president in 2008 would not be uncontested. “Hopefully, Condi won’t run this time, maybe next time,” said Bobby Howard, 51, a councillor from Tuscaloosa.

“We may have another woman who will run and we don’t need to muddy the water,” Howard explained in a reference to Hillary Clinton, his choice for president.

There is no question that Rice, who went to segregated schools until she was 13, is a more inspiring example of American meritocracy than the former first lady.

“It wasn’t that long ago that I was doing what you’re doing,” she told the pupils of Brunetta C Hill elementary. Her message was that if you work hard you can achieve anything. Birmingham was now “light years” away from its racist past, she said. Yet decades after official desegregration the school is still all-black and locals claim the area has grown poorer.

Blackburn, 80, her father’s friend, was in the audience.

“I think she would make a great president,” he said, before adding, however: “I think she would prefer to run the National Football League.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president