President Barack Obama would stay “even-handed” in the Democratic nomination process according to Senator Bernie Sanders who has mounted a tough challenge to frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
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In a statement, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest described the upcoming meeting as “informal”, saying Obama and Sanders discussed arranging the session during last month’s Congressional Holiday Ball. Obama told Politico. “You know, that has an appeal, and I understand that”.
What I’ve said to my campaign is that I would look forward to another debate.
Emerging from a 45-minute meeting with President Obama, Sanders said the session provided a chance to talk about both foreign and domestic policy and “occasionally a little bit of politics”.
During an interview in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Sanders had just spoken to a crowd of 14,000, Sanders said he expects the president and vice president to stay neutral during the Democratic primary and that he didn’t see Obama’s comments as a de facto endorsement of his opponent.
Obama has not endorsed a candidate in the Democratic primary contest, but he has expressed positive feelings about Clinton, who served as secretary of state after losing the nomination to him in 2008. “We are right now, as everybody knows, in a very tough campaign in Iowa and going on to New Hampshire”, Sanders said.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley takes 4 percent support in the new survey. While Sanders has 2.5 million total followers, Clinton has 5.23 million followers and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, boasts almost 5 million followers as well.
The campaign for Monday’s presidential caucuses in Iowa is beginning to resemble a bad flashback for Hillary Clinton.
The race between Sanders and Clinton has heated up in recent weeks, as the two Democratic candidates have been neck-and-neck in Iowa polls ahead of the first nominating contest. “If we have the kind of turnout that I hope we can”, Sanders told the rally, “then we’re going to win here in Iowa”. Sanders, on Saturday, compared his candidacy-and the criticisms of inexperience and pie-in-the-sky ideas it has received from the Clinton campaign-to Obama’s, and predicted Iowans would also choose him. “You hold their hands until you get them into the caucus, and you keep holding them”, Harkin says.
Sanders, who has made rebuilding the middle class a rallying cry of his campaign, went out of his way in talking to reporters to praise Obama’s economic accomplishments, citing statistics about the dire financial outlook he inherited.
Last year’s Tyndall Report measuring the airtime given to presidential candidates on ABC, CBS and NBC new channels found Bernie Sanders received less coverage than even Democratic non-candidate Joe Biden.
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Her final days in Iowa are a sprint through the state that opens voting in the 2016 campaign.
