Hillary Clinton: ‘Absolutely No Interest’ in Another Presidential Run; ‘No’ to Running for Governor or Senate Again, Too

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is probably going to face the questions for the rest of her life. But she’s strongly disavowing any interest in seeking elected office again in her career.

Asked by ABC’s Cynthia McFadden in an interview in Moscow if she’s “never going to run for president again,” Clinton responded:

“I have absolutely no interest in running for president again. None. None. I mean, I know that’s hard for some people to believe, but, you know, I just — I just don’t — I feel like that was a great experience — you know, I gave it all I had, I’m giving this job all I have. I try to live in the present, so it just seems, you know, that — that’s not in my future.”

Asked whether she’s contemplating resigning to run for Senate again, she said: “No. I am neither frustrated nor planning anything other than being the best secretary of state I could be.”

Asked about rumors that she’d run for governor of New York, Clinton responded: “No. No. I love the fact that there’s so much . . . curiosity about what I might do, but I’m so focused on what I am doing, I really can’t imagine why anybody would have time to think about something in the future.”

Clinton also talked in detail about President Obama’s request for her to serve as secretary of state, and why she ultimately said yes: “If I had called him, I would have wanted him to say yes.”

She also said she’s surprised by how much “one-on-one” time she gets with the president:

“I am shocked at how much time I spend in the White House. I mean, you know, for people on the outside, the idea of going to the White House for a meeting must seem like the most important, serious, even glamorous kind of thing to do. But I’ve been there so much, it’s . . . I say, oh, my gosh, I have to go to the White House again,” Clinton said.

“I spend so much time every week. I spend it in meetings with others in the White House. I spend it in meetings in the Situation Room, particularly given everything that’s going on. And I spend it one-on-one with the president. So there’s an enormous amount of interaction, which I find fascinating.”

Watch more of Cynthia McFadden’s interview with Secretary Clinton tonight on “World News,” with the full interviewing airing on “Nightline.”

Bill Clinton Attempts Second Fiddle, Again

ABC News’ Elizabeth Gorman Reports:

Bill Clinton loves shopping for all women, and sometimes loses track of his wife Hillary completely, according to an upcoming profile of the former president in the upcoming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

“The only bad thing about Hillary’s being secretary of state is I can’t always get hold of her,” he says. (Her mobile phone apparently doesn’t get reception inside the State Department fortress.)

The Times’ Peter Baker interviews Clinton about his life after the White House and the 2008 campaign trail, while married to a woman fully entrenched in the administration.

When they’re not on airplanes respectively, the couple sees each other about once a week at their home in Chappaqua, but usually Secretary Clinton has time only to rest.

The story also gives readers a peek into how Clinton spends his downtime finishing crossword puzzles and playing “Oh, Hell,” a card game that Steven Spielberg taught him.

This Clinton, seemingly a bit more humble now, is busy defining his role outside the Obama administration. After he left office, friends said they worried about Clinton, who appeared a bit lost before getting fully engaged in his foundation work.

Baker reports that at the start of the Obama administration, Clinton was still smarting a bit from the 2008 campaign experience. “He never felt a part of the campaign . . . She was keeping him distant,” one Hillary Clinton adviser told the Times.

And as for those controversial remarks he made on race during the South Carolina primary? Clinton attempts to brush off the interpretation of his remarks as pure politics.

“None of them ever really took seriously the race rap,” Clinton tells the Times. “They knew it was politics,” he says. Clinton tells about a minister who he met in Texas, during the general election. The minister supported Obama. “And he came up, threw his arm around me and said, ‘You’ve got to forgive us for that race deal.’ He said, ‘That was out of line.’ But he said, ‘You know, we wanted to win real bad.’ And I said, ‘I got no problem with that.'”

While Clinton allies say he has gotten over his resentment of Obama, the former president is still none too pleased with Sen. Ted and Caroline Kennedy and Gov. Bill Richardson’s endorsements of then-Sen. Obama, according to the Times’ story.

SC Guv Tries Again to Redirect Stimulus Funds

ABC News’ Teddy Davis reports:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) sent President Obama a letter on Tuesday, reformulating his request to pay state debt with $700 million in stimulus funds.

The letter comes one day after Obama’s budget director told Sanford that the state of South Carolina cannot use the stimulus funds to pay debt because the stimulus bill passed by Congress requires that the money be used for education or other government services.

In his Tuesday letter, Sanford seeks to fulfill the education requirement by promising to direct the funds towards South Carolina’s school facilities bonds and its research university infrastructure bonds.

The South Carolina governor seeks to fulfill the government service requirement by promising either to pay debt related to the state’s unemployment compensation trust fund, or to pay debt related to state retirees, or to pay other bonded indebtedness at the state level.

“I’ve made clear my opposition to using debt to solve a problem created in the first place by too much debt – and I don’t believe this to be an unreasonable position,” writes Sanford.