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One day before Hillary Clinton is expected to announce her presidential bid, President Obama said today she would make an "excellent president."

"She was a formidable candidate in 2008. She was a great supporter of mine in the general election. She was an outstanding secretary of state. She is my friend. I think she would be an excellent president," Obama said at a news conference in Panama.

"When she makes a decision to announce, I'm confident she will be very clear about her vision for the country moving forward if she announces," he added.

The president said he believes that Clinton's role as secretary of state has amply prepared her to "handle herself very well in any conversations and debates around foreign policy.

"If she decides to run, she's going to have some strong messages to deliver," he said.

Asked whether he thinks the Democratic field is wide open, Obama declined to weigh in.

"Not only have I run my last election, but I am not in the business of prognosticating future elections," he said. "That's your job and there is no shortage of people who are happy to opine on that. I will not be one."

Clinton is expected to announce her presidential campaign on social media on Sunday.

During the 2008 election, Obama and Clinton faced off in a brutal primary to decide the Democratic presidential nominee. Obama ultimately secured the nomination and won the presidency, but when he arrived at the White House, he brought Clinton along with him, selecting her as secretary of state and forming a close working relationship.

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President Obama Says Hillary Clinton Would Be an ...

CHICAGO --

The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state is expected to make her 2016 effort official Sunday with an online video followed by small events with residents of early-voting states over the days ahead. The campaign's opening strategy was described ahead of the announcement by two senior advisers who requested anonymity to discuss her plans.

If Clinton's strategy sounds familiar, it might be because President Barack Obama framed the choice for voters in 2012 as between Democrats focused on the middle class and Republicans wanting to protect the wealthy and return to policies that led to the Great Recession.

Clinton intends to sell herself as being able to work with Congress, businesses and world leaders, the advisers said Saturday. That approach could be perceived as a critique of Obama, who has largely been unable to fulfill his pledge to end Washington's intense partisanship and found much of his presidency stymied by gridlock with Congress.

In New York on Saturday, at the final event put on by "Ready for Hillary," a group not connected with her campaign that's worked for the past few years to stoke excitement for it, enthusiastic supporters joined elected officials and local party leaders to celebrate the launch to come.

"After she left the State Department she could have slipped into grandmother-hood, but people want to call her back into public service," said Jarret Berg, 29, a Democratic staffer in the New York legislature. "It's time for her."

As her official announcement loomed, the Republican National Committee linked Clinton to Obama, a regular focus of criticism from the GOP. "All Hillary Clinton is offering is a continuation of the same big government ideas that have grown Washington instead of the middle class," RNC spokesman Michael Short said in a statement Saturday. "That's why voters want fresh leadership and a new direction, not four more years of Obama's failed policies."

Clinton is not expected to roll out detailed policy positions in the first weeks of her campaign. Advisers said she planned to talk about ways families can increase take-home pay, the importance of expanding early childhood education and making higher education more affordable.

It's not yet clear whether that will include a noticeable break with Obama on economic policy. The GOP has hammered Obama's approach as anti-business and insufficient in the wake of the recession. The White House says the economy has improved significantly in recent years.

The unemployment rate fell to 5.5 percent in March, but manufacturing and new home construction slowed, cheaper gas has yet to ignite consumer spending and participation in the labor force remains sluggish.

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Hillary Clinton to announce presidential candidacy Sunday morning

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With an announcement on social media, she will pick up where she left off 7 years ago.

By Annie Karni

4/12/15 7:18 AM EDT

Updated 4/12/15 9:59 AM EDT

With much anticipation but little drama, Hillary Clinton is expected to officially announce Sunday she is running for president, a launch that will begin with a message on social media and continue over the next week with campaign visits to Iowa and New Hampshire.

The announcement marks an end to the first, awkward phase of Clintons roll-out a non-campaign that has frustrated Democrats who were anxious for her to turn the ignition switch on a campaign that the party is deeply invested in.

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For months Ive been getting calls from people who donate good money, asking when are we having an event, who are we writing a check to, said Jay Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat, and a longtime Clinton friend and fundraiser. Its completely topsy-turvy. The groundswell has been percolating for so long. This thing had to get going, I cant imagine we could have waited much longer. I cant tell you how many phone calls I get with people chomping at the bit.

For the past year, the former secretary of state has been treated like a candidate while lacking the structure around her to support one. That has led to some rusty moments as Clinton has sometimes painfully re-entered public life, outside of the State Departments protective bubble.

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Hillary Clinton readies presidential launch

Hillary Rodham Clinton will officially announce shes a candidate for the presidency on Sunday, but shes been running in place for the better part of two years.

Clinton was only out of the State Department a few months in the late spring of 2013, a period shes often described as one of apolitical reflection, relaxation and recharging, when friends began fielding interesting phone calls from her D.C. mansion, known as Whitehaven. One person in Clintons orbit at the time recalls picking up the phone and hearing Hello! Its Hillary! followed by a barrage of detailed queries about the organizational health of state parties in two key presidential battleground states Florida (bad) and Ohio (much, much worse).

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Thats when I knew she was going to do it, said the person, who also recalled sitting through one Im-never-doing-this-again conversation with Clinton after the 2008 election. To me she was always basically a yes, and wanted people to make the case for no. But the case for yes was always stronger.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who served as national party chairman during Bill Clintons second term, had a similar experience this time the topic was African-American politics a couple of months later at the June 2013 funeral of longtime Philadelphia congressman Bill Gray.

She asked me a lot of questions about people who attended that would only have been relevant for someone who would make use of those connections in the future as a candidate for office, he said. It was a surprise to me that she had made up her mind so early.

Around the same time, Clinton joined Twitter, and made her intentions tantalizingly unclear, describing herself as Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD

Even if most people around Clinton knew she would run, the candidate-to-be left that TBD deliberately open for months leaving herself latitude to ditch the entire enterprise if she got cold feet or faced a serious Democratic challenger. Its axiomatic to the point of clich to say that Clinton, the instant Democratic frontrunner, has wanted to be the first woman president since earliest girlhood in Chicago. The idea that she is unquenchably ambitious has embedded itself in the American consciousness, in part because she has been less artful about cloaking it in part because its true. In its 2016 Clinton kickoff skit, Saturday Night Live fabricated a 1940s sonogram of in-utero Hillary Rodham waving a campaign sign.

The truth is considerably more complicated. Clinton is dead-set on avoiding the mistakes of 08, and approved a series of secret reports studying the 2008 campaign in minute detail, friends and advisers say. But for all her calculation, shes been surprisingly noncommittal and reluctant to leave her comfortable double-mansion life for the grinding, grubby, lacerating realities of another campaign, fully exposed to the media horde she fears, loathes and fights.

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Hillary Clinton's slow walk to 'yes'

TIME Politics Hillary Clinton Brooks KraftCorbis Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton takes part in a Center for American Progress roundtable discussion on "Expanding Opportunities in America's Urban Areas" in Washington on March 23, 2015.

In February 2013, Hillary Clinton became a private citizen for the first time in two decades. The former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State said she was retiring from public view to spend more time at home with Bill to watch stupid movies and laugh at our dogs. But her foray into private life was brief, and it wouldnt be long before Clinton returned to politics with the grandest of goals: to become president.

Today, as she launches her second campaign for the White House, Clinton has definitively re-entered public life. But her time off was far from a vacation. Instead, Clinton was busy honing her stump speech, developing a campaign platform and carefully laying the groundwork for a massive campaign operation.

Here are some of the things Clinton did during the last two years.

She distanced herself from President Obama

One of Clintons greatest difficulties as a former Secretary of State in the Obama administration will be to differentiate herself from the current president, even as she expresses support for some of his policies. In an interview last year with The Atlantic, Clinton did just that: The president, she said, didnt do enough to assist Syrian rebels early in the bloody conflict. The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad, Clinton said at the time, left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.

She publicly supported gay marriage

Support for gay marriage is now a central part of the Democratic platform, and the candidate who wins the nomination will have to have same-sex marriage credentials. Clinton announced her support for gay marriage in a six-minute video released in March 2013. LGBT Americans are our colleagues, our teachers, our soldiers, our friends, our loved ones, telling viewers that she supported marriage equality personally, and as a matter of policy and law.

Some questioned her tardiness, though: Clintons proclamation came nearly a year after President Obamas, and by 2013, support of gay marriage was a mainstream view. In a testy interview on NPR, interviewer Terry Gross pushed her on whether her views on gay marriage had evolved, or Clinton had concealed her true views for political reasons. You are playing with my words, Clinton said. I did not grow up even imagining gay marriage and I dont think you did either. As Secretary of State, however, Clinton would have been breaking a longstanding tradition of keeping mum on domestic policy if she had voiced support of gay marriage.

She offered qualified praise for Obamacare

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What Hillary Clinton Did Before Her Campaign