If the project isn't very complicated, writing your own Makefiles
(using GNU Make wildcard, pattern replacement and suffix rules)
for it might be faster. Then it will compile faster too. :-)
The trouble is it is quite complicated :)
But: success! I not only managed to compile python static but I also managed to cross compile it. And best part: I can't take credit for any of of it, embedded guys rule ;-)
If someone interested, I can publish Python 2.6 with the most common modules, CMake (wasn't that trivial to compile either) and SCons as classic .tar.bz2 packages for /usr/local. Btw, that CMake was quite nice test case for g++, it heavily uses templates and stuff, I needed to increase stack for several hundreds of KB. But for both Python and CMake all tests passed OK!