First lady Michelle Obama campaigns for Hillary Clinton at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Thursday. | AP Photo President Obama: Michelle 'will never run for office'

First lady Michelle Obama “will never run for office,” President Barack Obama said Friday.

Michelle Obama has emerged as Hillary Clinton’s most potent surrogate on the campaign trail, passionately making the case for the Democratic nominee in battleground states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia — and even the typically reliably conservative Arizona — while also tearing into her opponent without ever mentioning him by name.


The first lady appeared alongside Clinton, a former first lady of Arkansas and of the United States herself, for the first time Thursday at a joint rally in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But the president quashed the notion that, like Clinton, his wife would ever seek office after leaving the White House.

“She will never run for office,” President Obama told the “Sway in the Morning” radio show. “She is as talented and brilliant a person as there is and I could not be prouder of her, but Michelle does not have the patience or the inclination to actually be a candidate herself. That’s one thing y’all can take to the bank.”

Even so, Obama insisted both he and Michelle would “continue to be very active” with issues they care about, such as the president’s My Brother’s Keeper and the first lady’s Let Girls Learn initiatives.

“So we’re gonna be doing a lot of work,” he said. “We’ll just be doing it a different way.”