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I had the chance to be governor for eight years and I took a year to transition out and a year to transition in, so that's a decade of my life where I pursued my own ambitions and I thought it was time to rearrange my life to focus on other things.

I'm not driven to get back into politics. It's not on my top five things to do before I die, but saying that, I may be in politics in the next year or the next ten years. I've been on the front line for 12 years, four in state government, eight on the national level.

I can't afford to be indifferent to politics, but I don't have personal ambitions.

After a great deal of thought and discussions with my family, I have decided not to seek re-election in 2014. Politics shouldn't be a career, and I never intended to make it one.

When I finished my term, I thought about running for governor then but decided not to because, frankly, I didn't think I was ready. I wasn't comfortable that I was prepared to do the job.

I'm not a politician. And I don't want to be.

I'm not sure I had a political career for the future anyway. I'm not sure that politics was what I wanted to spend my life doing.

I'm running for governor; I'm not running for a legislative office.