Gov. Pawlenty just had a news conference and he took himself out of the running for vice president by saying:
For the 900th time, I'm not running for vice president, don't want to be vice president and am focused on being governor of the state of Minnesota. I said I will fill out my term.
Now the governor has said some of this before, but it's the first time any of us and remember him saying that he doesn't want to be vice president. He said he laughs over all the speculation about his ambitions for higher office. Now skeptics are saying that he doesn't want to be VP because McCain isn't going to be president anyway. And some of my astute colleagues pointed out that the governor didn't say that he didn't want to be president. There's lots of speculation that Pawlenty will become a viable presidential candidate in 2012 after the Republican National Convention comes to town in 2008. We'll see. Clearly we just love speculation...