POLITICS: Clinton Wants to Be President, Not VP!

The Clinton-for-vice-president mania that kicked up briefly yesterday (only to be squashed by Clinton herself), was pretty misguided. Clinton has no interest in being vice president, former advisers tell Politico—but she may still want to be president. “Not happening,” one of Clinton’s top 2008 advisers said when asked about the VP rumors. “Stay tuned for 2016.” James Carville said he, too, assumed she’d run again, because “once you run for president, you always want to be president.”

Rumors about Clinton’s future aren’t likely to go away, however, largely because there are a galaxy of Clinton loyalists currently in exile from the Obama White House, all with a vested interest in seeing Clinton rise. Mark Penn, for instance, issued a pot-stirring poll recently testing Clinton against Obama as a 2012 matchup. In his book, Bob Woodward attributes the VP speculation to Penn, who, he writes, “always had his eye on the prize.”