Pat Dollard

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The Hill:

The White House is down playing speculation Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the vice presidential nominee in 2012.

“No one in the White House is discussing this as a possibility,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told CNN.

The speculation began after veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said in an interview Tuesday that the arrangement is “on the table.”

“It’s on the table,” Woodward said in an interview Tuesday on CNN. “Some of Hillary Clinton’s advisers see it as a real possibility in 2012.”

There had been previous talk that Vice President Biden could vacate his post in 2012, but the White House has generally dismissed that speculation.

An Obama-Clinton ticket would unite the two former rivals, who ran a down-to-the-wire race in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

A recent Gallup poll also sparked talk that Clinton could re-enter presidential politics in the next reelection cycle. Fifty-two percent of Democrats said they would vote for Obama in a hypothetical Democratic primary rematch against Clinton, opposed to 37 percent who say they would vote for Clinton.

Clinton later dismissed any aspirations of being vice president at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summitt in Washington.

“I don’t believe what I read,” Clinton said, according to CNN. “I have absolutely no interest and no reason for doing anything other than just dismissing these stories and moving on.”