Obama to meet with Sanders on Wednesday

Emerging from the White House after meeting with Obama for 45 minutes, Sanders said he wasn’t bothered by a recent interview in which Obama appeared to be tilting toward his former secretary of state.

The New Hampshire Union Leader announced Tuesday that it will partner with MSNBC to host a Democratic debate on February 4 – five days before the state’s crucial presidential primary.

“If the general election came down to (Republican Donald) Trump and myself and if Bloomberg chose to jump in, two of the three candidates would be multi-billionaires”, Sanders said in an interview with The Associated Press.

President Barack Obama will welcome Bernie Sanders to the White House, but he won’t necessarily feel the Bern.

“If I lose Iowa by two votes and end up with virtually the same number of delegates, is that a must-lose situation? No”, Sanders said aboard a charter flight en route to a rally in Duluth, Minnesota.

The DNC has a so-called “exclusivity clause”, which says that any candidate who participates in an unsanctioned debate will be excluded from one of the official six.

“I think he and the vice president have tried to be fair and even-handed in the process, and I expect they will continue to do that”, Sanders said.

Sanders told reporters after the meeting that he believes Obama will stay neutral as Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compete for their party’s nomination. Turning to his wife, Jane, he quipped: “Is that correct?”

But Sanders, who has surged ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire polls, has no plans to do so, his campaign said. “And so let’s try to make it happen”, the front-runner for the party nod said during an excerpt of an interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that will air Wednesday night.

The meeting between the sitting president and his sometime critic is a moment for the president to show his public neutrality in a heated and unexpectedly tight race to replace him – refuting suggestions that he’s in the can for Sanders’ rival, Hillary Clinton.

Sanders said he and Clinton are in a “nip-and-tuck” race in Iowa but predicted that, with a success, he would begin to see more support from establishment Democrats who have coalesced around the former secretary of state’s candidacy.

She added that the relationship between the one-time rivals had “turned into a real friendship”.

Since November, 145,940 people have signed Democracy for America petitions demanding the DNC hold more presidential debates. “But other elements of the establishment, even if they are not supportive of my candidacy, today understand that the major task in front of us is to defeat right-wing extremism”.

“There’s no secret that we have, as is the case in a Democratic society, we have differences of opinion”, Sanders said. There were 25 Democratic primary debates in 2008 and 15 in 2004, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. I knew her before you knew her, before she was Elizabeth Warren.