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Did Obama Just Endorse Hillary?

by L. Turner

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — you know, the most qualified potential 2016 presidential candidate around — got a shout-out from her former boss and 2008 competitor at Saturday night's White House Correspondents' Dinner. While giving a customary speech full of one-liners, President Barack Obama suggested that not only would Clinton run for president in the coming presidential elections — she would also win.

Hawaii-born Obama's long been dogged by rumors that he was born outside of the United States, because some conspiracy theorists seem to believe that because he has a Kenyan father, he was born in Kenya. (Yes, the president has furnished a birth certificate.) Obama referenced a possible 2016 Clinton run while cracking a joke about Fox News' right-wing slant and its indulgence of the birther movement. He suggested it'd be difficult for the network to go after a President Hillary Clinton in the same way.

Let’s face it, Fox, you’ll miss me when I’m gone. It’ll be harder to convince the American people that Hillary was born in Kenya.

The almost-kind of endorsement comes on the heels of a real one from Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who said on Saturday that he'd support a run by Clinton.

Obama made another joke about a Clinton run during his speech, this time at Vice President Joe Biden's expense. Biden is another potential candidate for a 2016 run. To get the joke, you have to know that a woman bizarrely threw a shoe at Clinton while she was making a speech at a Las Vegas convention on Thursday. The Phoenix woman has been charged by the feds with trespassing and violence, but at the dinner Obama suggested they'd got the wrong man:

You may have heard the other day that Hillary had to dodge a flying shoe at a press conference.

Then this image showed up on the screen.

Here's more from Kaine's endorsement of Clinton — who, by the way, hasn't yet said whether she'll run for the nation's top job.

If it were easy for women to achieve top leadership spots in this country, Congress would have more than 18 percent women serving. More than five percent of Fortune 500 companies would have a woman CEO. And women would be seated on more than a quarter of the federal benches across the country. ... So I’m doing my bit now to encourage Hillary Clinton to run.