by Rachel Ogbu

Hillary Clinton will step down as U.S. Secretary of State in a few months.

‘The Secretary has been honoured to serve as President Obama’s Secretary of State, and has loved every minute of leading this Department and being part of the State family,’ Philippe Reines, a Clinton spokesman, said .

He added: ‘She has said that she wants to ensure continuity, and realises the confirmation of her successor might take a period of days beyond that.’

Clinton who has decided to step down within ‘days’ of President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in January  is expected by most Democrats to be a prelude for a White House run in 2016, when she will be 69.

The top candidate to replace her is believed to be Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 who lose to incumbent, George W. Bush.

He is viewed as a more likely pick than Susan Rice,  U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, because of her widely-criticised appearance on Sunday talk shows in which she insisted that spontaneous demonstrators in Benghazi had killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

Clinton has previously announced that she is to step down from State early next year, and this week her spokesman confirmed that she was set to leave office within months.

Bill Clinton, who was one of the President’s most important surrogates throughout the campaign, spoke at a number of events over the weekend, but was not joined by his wife. She made a statement in response to enquiries about her absence from the Democratic National Convention, that Secretaries of State do not attend partisan political events. This perhaps explains her absence from the 2012 campaign trail.

The couple apparently voted together near their home in Chappaqua, New York on Tuesday evening, their trip to the polls was not publicised or photographed.

Mrs. Clinton finally resurfaced on Thursday, when she presided over a ceremony to grant U.S. citizenship to children born abroad and adopted by American parents.

She has repeatedly claimed that she will not run for President again after her failed bid in 2008, and has added that she will not seek any public office after leaving the State. Department

However, many pundits are skeptical of her protestations, and the main article this morning on Politico, a news website popular with insiders, anointed her the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

We recall that Clinton was the frontrunner too in 2008. But, that’s all history now.