Obama Says Hillary Would Be An Excellent President

It sure sounds like President Obama favors his old Secretary of State taking over the top job, doesn't it? In attendance at the Summit of the Americas in Panama on Saturday, and already having made some big news by meeting with Cuban President Raul Castro, Obama kept the ball rolling with a simple, strong comment on the widely anticipated presidential campaign announcement of Hillary Clinton. In short, Obama said Hillary would be "an excellent president" — not a surprising endorsement, exactly, but an early and intriguing one.

Clinton is widely expected to announce her campaign for the presidency on Sunday, kicking off her second-ever bid. She’ll be running at a seemingly ideal time, at least as far as her in-party opposition goes — there really aren’t any considerable challengers to her sky-high name recognition, at least not at this early date. Among the oft-rumored challengers that could step forward (guys like Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, Joe Biden and yes, Bernie Sanders), there really isn’t a particularly credible upstart rival on offer.

In other words, there is no obvious Senator Obama to get in her way. And now the aching memories of that ugly 2008 primary campaign are apparently in the rear-view mirror, at least enough for so Obama to call Clinton his “friend,” and to laud her potential.

With respect to Hillary Clinton, I'll make my comments very brief. She was a formidable candidate in 2008, she was a great supporter of mine in the general election, she was an outstanding Secretary of State, she is my friend, I think she would be an excellent president, and I'm not on the ballot. So, I'm not gonna step on her lines. When she makes a decision to announce, I'm confident that she will be very clear about her vision for the country moving forward.

Hopefully this doesn't cause any tension around the White House. You just know Joe Biden is still stalking the halls someplace, dreaming of what might have been. It's impossible to avoid the truth, however — there are simply no convincing alternatives for the Democrats in 2016 so far. Obviously President Obama had good cause to line up behind whatever Democrat stands the best chance of freezing the GOP of the White House for another eight years, both for his party's sake, and his own besieged political legacy.

Of course, the real question all along has been whether Clinton would want tat support, whether she'd run with Obama's record, or from it. And it sounds like she's going with the former — according to The New York Times, the Clinton team has decided to utilize the President as a key component of their campaign, after much debate over whether his record would be more asset or liability.

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