By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington : Hillary Clinton has all but ruled out running for US president in 2012 and said she wasn’t interested in any high-level positions if one time Democratic rival Barack Obama becomes president.
The former first lady, who fought a long and bitter primary battle with Obama for the Democratic ticket, told Fox News Channel Tuesday that her chances of making another bid for the White House were “probably close to zero”.
She had no interest in being nominated to the US Supreme Court or of becoming the Senate majority leader either, Clinton who has been campaigning for Obama for the Nov 4 presidential election, told the channel in an interview.
“I’m not seeking any other position than to be the best senator from New York that I can be…there’s an old saying: ‘Bloom where you’re planted’,” she said, adding that she simply looked forward to working in the Senate with an Obama administration.
“I ran for president because I thought we had to make drastic changes, given what I viewed as the damage that the Bush administration had done here at home and abroad. Now I’m going to work very hard with President Obama to repair that damage,” she added.
Speculation about Clinton being nominated to the Supreme Court had mounted after Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at the Harvard Law School who is advising Obama’s campaign, said last spring he thought she may be a good fit for the apex court.
Hillary Clinton has made more than 50 campaign stops for Obama, including in the pivotal state of Pennsylvania with former president Bill Clinton, along with Joe Biden, Obama’s vice-presidential running mate.
In a separate interview with NBC, she assured viewers that any hard feelings she may have felt after losing to Obama were long past. “You know, it isn’t anymore,” she said when asked if it was difficult for her and her husband to campaign for Obama.
“I mean obviously when you run a hard-fought campaign, there is a lot of emotion attached to it. You believe you’d be the best president, you give it all you’ve got, but you know, that wasn’t meant to be.”
In yet another TV interview Clinton also made critical comments about Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, who on her nomination had acknowledged the New York senator’s role in putting 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling for women in politics – a reference to the number of primary votes Clinton won.
“I would like to see the very first woman in the White House who I agree with and who I think has policies that would really fulfil the goals that I have for our country,” Clinton said on CNN when asked what she thought of the possibility of Palin serving as vice-president.
“Of course, it’s exciting to have a woman on the ticket. The Democrats had a vice-presidential candidate as a woman back in 1984. The Republicans did it this year. But that, in and of itself, is not enough reason…I am going to be supporting women and men with whom I agree, who I believe have the right policies and the right ideas about what’s best for America.”
Asked about the McCain campaign’s recent attempts to attack Obama’s character and associations by raising his relationship with a controversial professor, William Ayers, she said: “I think that all kinds of issues are raised in campaigns, but it really depends upon how they’re raised and Senator Obama and his campaign have responded to this.”
A 1960s leader of the domestic terrorist group Weatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society, Ayers is now a professor of education and a senior university scholar at the University of Illinois. He once served on a community board with Obama.