By Jennifer Loven
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania - Travelling in Africa on a goodwill tour that is in part intended to promote women's rights, United States first lady Laura Bush said on Wednesday that she would not automatically vote for a woman in a field of candidates for president of the United States.
"If a woman were to run, it would be exactly the same thing I would consider in any other election - and that is who I think has the best character, whose views are similar to mine," Bush told reporters as her plane brought her here from Cape Town, South Africa.
The wife of Republican President George Bush raised - and then quickly rejected - the idea of supporting a Democrat. "I would vote for, in most cases, the Republican," she said and then added after a pause: "Maybe I should say in all cases."
Her predecessor as first lady, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is likely seen as a potential Democratic candidate for 2008. Other women have also been mentioned as eventual White House hopefuls such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, both Republicans.
The first lady said she has no intention of ever running herself. "I've ruled out the possibility of running for president. I actually never considered the possibility of running for president," she said.
Mrs Bush, accompanied by daughter Jenna, descended from their plane to a red carpet on a hot tarmac to be greeted by traditional African dancers.
At a Catholic-run organisation here that provides Aids treatment prevention, Jenna Bush offered gifts to children orphaned by the disease, handing them pens, bookmarks, photos of the presidential dogs and spiral notebooks before she and the first lady heard their stories.
In a part of the continent that is key in the US-led war on terror, Mrs Bush was also preaching an American goodwill message to the country's large Muslim population. She was visiting Tanzania for two days.
The possibility that overwhelmingly Muslim Zanzibar - Tanzania's Indian Ocean archipelago - could turn toward a stricter form of Islam and away from democracy in fall elections is posing some concerns in Tanzania's secular government.
Mindful of the 1998 deadly truck bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and in Nairobi, the capital of neighbouring Kenya, Washington is keeping an eye on an area where anti-Western rhetoric has increasingly been a feature of Friday sermons.
The elections set for October 30 in Zanzibar are feared to be even more turbulent than the other two rounds that have been held since single-party rule ended in 1992. In recent months, six people have been killed, voter registration centers have been attacked and homes as well as churches have been set afire in political violence.
Semiautonomous Zanzibar, which united with the mainland in 1964, elects its own president and legislature.
Mrs Bush is playing ambassador to Muslims during her visit to Zanzibar, going to the Al Rahma Madrasa Pre-Primary School to tout a US-funded effort to increase the community's access to education by helping to build schools. After a classroom tour, she was to talk with students, parents and teachers. - Sapa-AP