Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton sent mixed messages when she said she did not want to run for president again, but after hesitating she added that she would like to be president someday.
When asked by tech magazine Recode's Kara Swisher at a taping Friday of the Recode Decode podcast whether she wanted to run for president again, Clinton said, "No, no."
But after a pause and some prodding from Swisher, Clinton said, "Well, I'd like to be president."
"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," she elaborated, later adding, "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."
When Swisher asked whether Clinton would be doing that heavy lifting, Clinton replied, "Oh, I have no idea. ... I'm not even going to even think about it till we get through this November 6 election about what's going to happen after that."
Swisher tweeted Monday morning that Clinton seemed to mean she would have preferred to win the presidency in 2016, not that she planned to pursue it again.
"Tweeps, simmer down!" Swisher tweeted. "While it perhaps sounded like @HillaryClinton refused to rule it out, my take is she was basically implying she wishes she were president but doesn't relish running again."
