Carney: ‘It’ll be awesome’ if Cruz, Paul run

White House press secretary Jay Carney joked Friday that it would be “awesome” if Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) ran for president in 2016.

“I think they all ought to run,” Carney said. “It’ll be awesome.”

{mosads}Carney made the quip as he was looking to deflect questions about whether President Obama would choose sides in a hypothetical Democratic showdown between Vice President Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I’m not going to get into 2016,” Carney said. “Unless you want to — we could talk about the Republicans. That’s pretty interesting.”

The questions about Biden and Clinton came on the heels of revelations that Obama’s campaign team secretly weighed replacing Biden with Clinton on the 2012 ticket.

According to Double Down, an upcoming book by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, spooked by the president’s dropping poll numbers in fall of 2011, ordered campaign staffers to poll and focus-group the impact of a switch.

Carney dismissed the report, saying there was no serious discussion of dropping Biden from the ticket.

He also said Obama believed Biden would be a strong president.

“I think the president picked Joe Biden as his running mate for the right reason, which is that, if necessary, Vice President Biden could be president,” Carney said. “That’s, I think, the first item on your checklist when you’re picking your running mate.”