"Obama has made clear in private conversations that he doesn't like the idea of Sanders as the [View all]

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nominee"


From "The Hidden History of Sanders’s Plot to Primary Obama" in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/02/sanders-obama-primary-challenge/606709/

Obama has made clear in private conversations that he doesn’t like the idea of Sanders as the nominee (and has been only slightly more subtle in public comments), but he’s pushed back on some who have urged him to get involved, anxious that any move he makes could destroy the hope of him using his unique position to unite the party and defeat Trump during the general election. In a party this divided, Obama- and Sanders-style Democrats finding a connection may be the only way to win in November.

Obama is determined to make it work—if he has to.

“Obama has several friends and former colleagues in the race but believes that in order for the Democratic Party to be successful, voters will have to pick their candidate,” a person close to Obama told me. “Obama will campaign his heart out for whoever the nominee is, and that includes Senator Sanders.”

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Criticism of Obama from the left, while not representative of the opinions of most Democrats, was not unusual at the time. Left-leaning activists pushed the president on issues such as foreclosure relief, judicial nominations, and drone strikes. In August 2011, just as Reid was being called in to to help stop Sanders’s primary plans, David Sirota—a former Sanders press secretary who remained plugged in to the senator’s thinking during the Obama years and would join Sanders’s 2020 campaign as a senior adviser and speechwriter—wrote that Obama was “eloquent, dissembling, conniving, intelligent and, above all, calm,” and was using those traits in service of being “a Bizarro FDR” with a “hideous and destructive” record.

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On the rare occasions Obama White House staff thought about Sanders, it was because he was needling or annoying them, several former Obama aides recalled. Before Sanders started running for president, he had never been to see Obama in the Oval Office. And even though most of them didn’t know how far Sanders’s primary plans had gone, Obama aides took notice of his public comments. Today, the bitterness lingers.

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