After Oval Office Meeting Bernie Sanders Lauds Obama Legacy

[mountaineer]

USA Today

WASHINGTON — Emerging from the West Wing after a 45-minute meeting with President Obama Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders dismissed any notion of significant distance between his agenda and Obama's legacy.

Sanders said the meeting was intended to get him up to speed on a wide array of current issues, and touched on "foreign policy issues, domestic issues, and occasionally a little bit of politics." But just as importantly, the meeting seemed designed to banish any perception that Obama was giving a nod toward former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Democratic campaign for president.

Obama has professed his neutrality in the Democratic primary process. But in an interview with Glenn Thrush of The Politico, Obama also suggested that Clinton doesn't get enough credit as an "idealistic and progressive" candidate — adjectives more often associated with Sanders. "I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives," Obama said.

The Vermont senator tried to downplay any suggestion that Obama is putting his finger on the scale for his former Secretary of State, saying Obama and Vice President Biden have been as "even-handed as possible."

And for his part, Sanders made clear that he's not laying the problems of income inequality on Obama's doorstep.

"It is absolutely fair to say — and I say it every day — that we have got to do a lot better to protect the middle class and working families. But it is also important to remember how far we have come in the last seven years under the leadership of President Obama and Vice President Biden," Sanders told reporters outside the White House. "By and large, over the last seven years on major issue after major issue, I have stood by his side where he has taken on unprecedented Republican obstructionism and has tried to do the right thing for the American people."

Sanders even alluded to Obama's 2008 campaign as a template for his own 2016 race.

"I think what the Iowa campaign ends up being about is one word, and that is turnout. We're feeling really good about where we are," he said. "Now, I'm not saying we could do what Barack Obama did in 2008. I wish we could but I don't think we can. But if there is a large turnout, I think we win."

"I think the American people, working people, young people, want to see real movement in this country," he said.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Obama isn't endorsing either candidate, but that the kind of energy Sanders is bringing to the campaign will be good for Democrats up and down the ballot. "It's good for the Democratic party to have such a robust debate going on about who should be our party's nominee," he said. "And in the context of that debate, Sen. Sanders has had great success engaging and even inspiring a large segment of the Democratic party."

Obama has met with Clinton semi-regularly at the White House, even after she left his cabinet in 2013, but the only one-on-one meeting with Sanders happened in 2014. The seeds for Wednesday's meeting were planted when the two met at a holiday party for members of Congress at the White House last month.

Obama also probably enjoyed talking politics. "I anticipate there was an opportunity for the president to reminisce about his own experience campaigning for president," he said.

They probably recited Mao's little red book to one another over a couple of drinks. Good times!

[mountaineer]

AP via WashPost (excerpted)
Obama, Sanders at the White House: Nice chat but that’s all
By Kathleen Hennessey | AP January 27 at 6:30 PM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama and his aides have said a lot of nice things about Bernie Sanders, but not this one: He’s ready to be president.

The key omission was particularly noticeable Wednesday as Obama and Sanders met for their first one-on-one since Sanders jolted the Democratic campaign and locked Hillary Clinton in an unexpectedly tight race.

The long-discussed meeting between Obama and his sometime critic was a moment for the president to display his public neutrality in the heated primary race to replace him — rebutting suggestions that he’s in the tank for Clinton. For Sanders, it was a chance to show he’s got some sway with a president who’s still popular among Democrats.

“By and large, over the last seven years on major issue after major issue, I have stood by his side where he has taken on unprecedented Republican obstructionism and has tried to do the right thing for the American people,” Sanders said after the meeting.

But neither the White House nor Sanders is suggesting the men are kindred spirits, or even close political allies. White House officials say the men lack much of a personal relationship and have markedly different approaches to politics. The president this week declared bluntly he doesn’t see Sanders’ upstart campaign as a reboot of his own battle against Clinton in 2008. Obama allies bristle at comparisons between Sanders and the president.

It’s a reminder that even as Obama watches the nomination battle from a distance, he is personally tied to the outcome. He remains focused on ensuring a Democrat wins the White House and on protecting his legacy. Increasingly, it appears, he sees Clinton as his best hope.

Sanders emerged from the 45-minute meeting with gracious things to say about his host.

He said he believes Obama has been “even handed” in his dealing with the candidates. The president has campaigned for him in the past, Sanders noted, harking back a decade to an appearance then-Sen. Obama made in Vermont. And he has campaigned for Obama, he said, delivering a pointed rebuke to Clinton, who has suggested Sanders has been disloyal to the president.

The White House had kind words for Sanders’ contribution to Democrats enthusiasm, although not his leadership.

“That ability to engage Democrats and excite them and inspire them will be critical to the success of Democrats up and down the ballot,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “Whether Senator Sanders is the nominee or not.”

The caveat was a marked contrast to remarks Obama recently made about Clinton. In an interview with Politico, the president described his former secretary of state as “more experienced than any non-vice president has ever been who aspires to this office.” Sanders has “great authenticity, great passion and is fearless,” Obama said, but he added the senator is untested.

White House officials say the Obama interview was a reflection of his close, working relationship with Clinton and his focus on wanting Democrats to win, not his discomfort with Sanders. 

Although Sanders and Obama overlapped in the Senate, they have few personal ties. Sanders, an independent who tends to vote with Democrats, is an unabashed liberal willing to hold the line. Obama has shown far more interest in pragmatism than ideological purity.

The president respects the role Sanders has played in the Senate, a White House official said. Indeed, a younger Obama once cheered that effort.

“It seems like power is always trumping principle,” Obama said as he campaigned for Sanders in 2006. “Things can change, that we can overcome that cynicism.”   ...

Sanders rails against the gap between the nation’s wealthy and poor, which has grown during Obama’s presidency, and slams the role of Wall Street and big corporations in the economy.

He also blasts the proliferation of big money in politics. In 2012, Obama blessed the creation of a Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA Action, to support his re-election bid. ...

[mountaineer]

Just three days ago:

Make no mistake: Obama just tried to undercut Bernie Sanders
WashPost
Jan 25, 2016

The Hillary Clinton campaign has been engaged in an aggressive effort to accomplish one crucial political goal: Knocking off Bernie Sanders’ halo. One common thread running through many Clinton attacks on Sanders — whether it’s questioning his record on guns or suggesting his single payer dream isn’t going to happen — has been to try to portray Sanders as a conventional politician (after all) who is not quite as pure as the scenes of his rapt, transported crowds suggest and is promising more than he can deliver.

Clinton may have just gotten an assist in this regard from none other than President Barack Obama.

In an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, this exchange happened, after Thrush asked Obama whether Sanders was successfully duplicating the optimistic, transformation-promising message that helped him defeat Clinton in 2008:


THRUSH: I mean, when you watch this, what do you — do you see any elements of what you were able to accomplish in what Sanders is doing?

OBAMA: Well, there’s no doubt that Bernie has tapped into a running thread in Democratic politics that says: Why are we still constrained by the terms of the debate that were set by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago? You know, why is it that we should be scared to challenge conventional wisdom and talk bluntly about inequality and, you know, be full-throated in our progressivism? And, you know, that has an appeal and I understand that.

I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives. I don’t want to exaggerate those differences, though, because Hillary is really idealistic and progressive. You’d have to be to be in, you know, the position she’s in now, having fought all the battles she’s fought and, you know, taken so many, you know, slings and arrows from the other side. And Bernie, you know, is somebody who was a senator and served on the Veterans’ Committee and got bills done. And so the—

THRUSH: But it sounds like you’re not buying the — you’re not buying the sort of, the easy popular dichotomy people are talking about, where he’s an analog for you and she is herself?

OBAMA: No. No.

Obama subsequently argued that Clinton’s “strengths can be her weaknesses,” acknowledging that her campaign is “more prose than poetry,” but that underlying this is an argument for Clinton, i.e., that her realism about what governing will require equips her to be president on “day one.”

What this really represents, I think, is Obama essentially taking sides in one of the fundamental underlying arguments of the 2016 Democratic primary: the battle between Clinton’s and Sanders’ theories of change. As I’ve argued, Sanders’ argument represents an intriguing mix of pessimism and optimism. His case is basically that America faces structural challenges so profound and immense (soaring inequality that has resulted in oligarchy paralyzing our government; climate change that threatens to undermine the future of human civilization) that only big, big solutions proportionate to the scale of these challenges will do. Sanders further argues that such ambitious solutions are possible despite the seeming GOP grip on at least one chamber of Congress, through mobilizing the masses, particularly young people, to force another transformational moment rivaling other moments of great change in American history.

Clinton, by contrast, has suggested that the structural realities underlying our politics — the country’s deep ideological divisions; our political system’s built-in impediments to change; the forbidding math underlying GOP control of the House — mean that advances under the next Dem president would likely be ground out on the margins, perhaps in less-than-inspirational fashion.

Obama is basically trying to pour cold water on the loftiness of Sanders’ argument, by nodding to the “appeal” of promising another transformative moment, while suggesting that Clinton’s more constrained view of what can be “delivered” is more realistic, and that this is actually an attribute that recommends her for the presidency.   ...

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