At least one veteran of the first Clinton administration is willing to bet that there won’t be a second.
Mike McCurry, who served as President Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1994 to 1998, told Real Clear Politics that he might be the “last person in Washington” who thinks Hillary Clinton might skip another run at the White House.
“You seem to be convinced that Mrs. Clinton’s running. I like to say I’m the only person … the only last person in Washington who’d be willing to take some bet that she might not run,” McCurry said in a video interview with the news agency.
That puts him at odds with the other Clintonites who have lined up with the shadow campaign infrastructure that’s been built to support a presumed Hillary 2016 run.
McCurry pointed to the work Hillary is doing at the Clinton Foundation and the grueling experience of a political campaign as possible reasons that she would choose not to launch another bid.
“Because I think she’s doing terrific work, talk about … finding other ways to make a contribution,” he said. “The work she’s doing through the Clinton Foundation, she finds terrifically rewarding. I’ve heard her talk about that a little bit. She gets very excited about it.”
“We all know what running for president is like … shaking hands with a lot of sometimes less-than-interesting local political people,” McCurry continued. “She’s going to do that for the next two and a half years at age 65 when she could be doing all this great stuff on a global stage? I don’t know. I think that’s why she hasn’t said, ‘I’m doing it.'”
But if Hillary did run, McCurry does believe she’d been a “formidable” candidate.
“I think she would be formidable because, among other things, she’d do the job very well,” he said. “I am confident when I say, ‘Hillary Clinton would be a good president’ that she would be.”
