Like a regifted rice cooker during the summer of weddings, Hillary Clinton steams forward.
Facebook users just couldn’t believe the Daily Mail headline “Hillary Clinton says she'd still like to be president.” Quickly, they marked it as possibly containing misinformation for third-party fact checkers to investigate.
The article refers to an interview Clinton gave journalist Kara Swisher on the podcast “Recode Decode.”
After Swisher asked “do you want to run again?” Clinton answered “no.” “Wait. There was a pause…” Swisher noted. “Well, I’d like to be president,” she responded with an exerted chuckle.
Clinton continued:
I think, hopefully, when we have a Democrat in the Oval Office in January of 2021, there's going to be so much work to be done. I mean we have confused everybody in the world, including ourselves.
We have confused our friends and our enemies. They have no idea what the United States stands for, what we're likely to do, what we think is important. So the work would be work that I feel very well prepared for having been at the Senate for eight years, having been a diplomat in the State department, and it's just going to be a lot of heavy lifting.
Oddly enough, Daily Mail titled its clip of the interview “Hillary Clinton says she won’t run for the presidency in 2020.” TWS Fact Check would note that listing one’s resume while discussing future potential-employment does not translate to a clear “won’t run.” She also suggested that she may consider running once the midterms are up.
'I'm not even going to even think about it until we get through this November 6 election about what's going to happen after that,' she said.
'But I'm going to everything in my power to make sure we have a Democrat in the White House come January of 2021.'
Furthermore, the question was “do you want to run again” not “will you run again.” (But, we’re now entering a level of over-analysis dangerous even for the meticulous fact checker.) Reader, recall the countless times you’ve heard politicians skirt around questions of “running.” Is this much different?
Perhaps for the ex-Madam Secretary, X time's the charm.
If you have questions about this fact check, or would like to submit a request for another fact check, email Holmes Lybrand at hlybrand@weeklystandard.com or the Weekly Standard at factcheck@weeklystandard.com. For details on TWS Fact Check, see our explainer here.