Strong Running Mate : Politics: Hillary Clinton campaigns for her husband, Bill, in Studio City. But some women say she is presidential material too.

Hillary Clinton hadn’t arrived for her 8 a.m. speech yet, so the Hollywood women were killing time at their table by eating miniature muffins and chatting alternately about an upcoming abortion-rights rally and a recent episode of “Murphy Brown.”

“It was so funny,” said one woman, telling of the TV show’s deft parody of a U.S. Senate investigation of news leaks that preceded last fall’s confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas--a nationally televised spectacle that angered many women.

But when Clinton strode briskly into a Studio City ballroom Tuesday, the chitchat stopped and necks craned. Even before she reached the podium, the women at the table--directors, writers and liberal activists used to being up close and personal with entertainment and political stars--were applauding.

“The idea of having a professional woman in the White House who’s equal to her husband is really fascinating,” said one woman admiringly.

“She’s not a fluff,” said another. “The days of politicians having arm-piece wives are over.”

And so it goes these days for Clinton, who has become a darling of the women’s movement since telling a “60 Minutes” interviewer last month that she was not “some little woman standing by my man” after her husband, Arkansas governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Clinton, became the target of unsubstantiated charges of marital infidelity.

As Bill Clinton’s lagging campaign faced a new test in the South Dakota primary Tuesday, his wife delivered a vigorous speech to nearly 500 people--most of them women--at the Sportsmen’s Lodge, attacking George Bush as “yesterday’s man” and deflecting questions about why she wasn’t running for President herself.

A nationally respected attorney and children’s rights activist, the 44-year-old Clinton was repeatedly applauded by members of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee and other local Democratic activists as she outlined her husband’s support for abortion rights, education reform and job training programs.

“This woman is a wonderful woman that women identify with,” said actress Mary Steenburgen, a fellow Arkansan and longtime close friend of the Clintons. “I just think, ‘God, we’d have a voice in this country in this woman.’ ”

Clinton criticized Bush as “yesterday’s man and yesterday’s President” who has no vision for America and has done little to alleviate problems in the country’s education and health-care systems.

Bush and his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, she charged, also created a divisive political mood in the country that has pitted “region against region, race against race, income group against income group and even. . .men against women.”

In an apparent reference to widespread news coverage of allegations of womanizing and draft-dodging against her husband, Clinton urged the media to “ask itself some hard questions about the role it’s playing” in the election campaign.

“If the press does not take a hard look at itself and say, ‘We also have to change, we also have to take responsibility for the role we play,’ it’s going to be very difficult for us to run the kind of issue-oriented politics that this country desperately needs,” she said to loud applause.

Asked if she would run for President herself in the year 2000, Clinton simply smiled and said, “We’ll talk about that in the year 2000.”

Many women in the audience clearly were impressed with Clinton, a rarity among political wives in that she is qualified for high office herself. Her husband has said he would consider her for a Cabinet post, and friends have touted her for attorney general.

In 1988 and again last year, she was voted among America’s 100 most influential lawyers by the prestigious National Law Journal. She also is chairwoman of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund, a Washington-based children’s rights group.

After graduating from Yale Law School, where she met her future husband, Clinton went on to work as legal counsel to the House committee that investigated possible impeachment proceedings against former President Richard Nixon.

She has taught at the University of Arkansas Law School and helped compile the state’s “Handbook on Legal Rights for Arkansas Women.”

“I think she’s a smart, empowered woman,” said Sharon Gelman, a human-rights staffer at the Hollywood Policy Center, a group of politically minded entertainment figures.

“It’s great to see a professional woman in the role she’s in,” said Gelman.

“It’s not ‘Come here to see Hillary Clinton’; it’s ‘Come here to see one of the top 100 lawyers in the country,’ ” said Laura Deutsch, another Hollywood Policy Center staffer.