Via Becket Adams, skip to 3:00 for the key bit. She’s asked whether she’s thinking of running for anything, not whether she’s thinking of running for president, and yet somehow the idea of it was plausible enough to her that she felt she had to formally deny it. It’s like having a casual acquaintance come up to you to say that he’s sorry but he simply can’t make it to your wedding when he wasn’t invited and never, ever would have been. Do her media pals here really not understand that, after last year’s trauma, Democrats won’t go near another Clinton as nominee for 50 years? At least not one who’s palpably much more like Hillary than like Bill.

Although maybe we’re misreading her denial. She’s not the person to take on Trump … but perhaps she knows someone who is?

Hillary Clinton is moving back into the spotlight as the vanquished Democratic presidential nominee seeks to carve out her role during the Trump administration…

With her new rallying cry of “Resist, persist, insist, enlist,” Clinton is keeping up her fight against Trump while giving Democrats space to find a new person to carry the torch in 2020.

“She’s always been someone who gets out there and fights for what she thinks is right,” one former Clinton campaign staffer told The Hill…

Prominent Democrats who supported Clinton during the campaign told The Hill that they are encouraged by her new approach.

Nah, I’m just kidding. Even Chelsea doesn’t think Hillary will run again. If she couldn’t beat an insurgent longshot like Trump with a popular-ish incumbent president in her corner, she’s not going to beat him as a two-time failed candidate when he has the advantage of incumbency. Unless, of course, his job approval is a smoking crater come 2020. But then, how likely is that?

I don’t think it’s the prospect of losing to Trump a second time that will ultimately deter Hillary from running. It’s the prospect of being roundly rejected by her own party in favor of a more charismatic liberal like Elizabeth Warren. She battled the Obama juggernaut to the end in 2008 and actually won the national popular vote in 2016, but there’s every reason to believe after last year’s failure that she’d get blitzed by jittery Democrats in a 2020 primary. Why end her career that way when she can end it as the first woman presidential nominee in American history?