President Obama will meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, offering presidential face-time just days before voting in the presidential campaign begins next week, White House officials said Tuesday evening.
A statement by Mr. Obama’s spokesman said there would be “no formal agenda” for the meeting between the two men. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Obama and Mr. Sanders first discussed a meeting when the Democratic candidate attended the Congressional Holiday Ball at the White House in December.
But the White House meeting for Mr. Sanders comes at a critical time, as he seeks to defeat Hillary Clinton, the president’s former secretary of state, in the Iowa caucuses on Monday.
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Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, declined to say what topics Mr. Sanders and President Obama would discuss.
“This is not about the campaign,” Mr. Weaver said. “This is about the senator talking with the president about important issues facing the country.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders fired up big crowds in St. Paul and Duluth on Tuesday, trying to keep momentum building for his surging Democratic campaign just days from when the first votes of the presidential race are cast.
More than 14,000 people came to St. Paul’s RiverCentre — a third of them in an overflow crowd — for the Vermont senator’s evening speech, and earlier, about 6,000 people packed his afternoon rally at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center.
In both cities, Sanders spoke in typically fiery fashion on his themes of reducing income inequality, breaking the influence of big money in politics and reforming the criminal justice system.
“You, and millions of other people, need to come together,” Sanders said in Duluth, adding that what he advocates is no less than a political revolution. “You need to say loud and clear that when so many men and women fought and died to save our country, that we the people are going to have a government that represents us, not just a handful of billionaires.”
In St. Paul, he said that no president “can effectively address the crisis facing our country unless there is a political revolution.” The crowd cheered when he attacked the campaign finance system as corrupt and the criminal justice system as broken, and booed when he singled out Wal-Mart for not paying its workers enough and railed against Wall Street, corporate America, the corporate media and the Koch brothers.
Bernie Sanders seemed awestruck by the size of his crowd Tuesday night in Minnesota, making a dramatic entrance with his wife, Jane, down a catwalk at the RiverCentre in downtown St. Paul.
Not only were about 10,000 people standing on the floor of the convention center, officials said, but an overflow room holding nearly 5,000 also had filled. The turnout for Tuesday's appearance nearly tripled an event that he held in neighboring Minneapolis in May, shortly after he announced his candidacy.
"My God, what a turnout!" Sanders said, surveying the sprawling room that stretched more than half the length of a football field. "Our campaign has the energy, we can see it here tonight."
Even the overflow room held several thousand supporters who seemed equally pleased to be watching the senator on two Jumbotrons. Sanders spoke to the crowd briefly before taking the main stage.
The crowd was filled with young supporters toting signs, stickers and buttons. At the end of the rally, two young woman marched triumphantly out of the hall waving a sign, "Suffering from severe heartbern."
"Our campaign has the momentum because people are sick and tired of establishment politics and establishment economics," Sanders said.
Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders, said on Tuesday evening that Mr. Sanders did not want to participate in an unsanctioned debate next month because he could risk being denied participation in future debates.
The debate would be held Feb. 4 in New Hampshire, five days before the state’s primary. It would be sponsored by MSNBC and The New Hampshire Union Leader, which announced that the “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd and the MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow would moderate the debate.
The Democratic National Committee has “said this will be an unsanctioned debate, so we would not want to jeopardize our ability to participate in future debates,” Mr. Weaver said.
He added that if the Democratic National Committee did sanction the debate, the campaign’s stance would be different.
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Mr. Weaver, the Sanders campaign manager, said that what is needed “is a rational, thought-out schedule of debates. Not just ad hoc debates scheduled whenever a network decides they want to have one.”
He said: “We think there should be at least three or four more debates following the ones that are currently scheduled. Senator Sanders has wanted more debates from the beginning of this campaign, and we are happy to see that it looks like we are likely to get them.”
In an interview with Politico published on Monday, Obama complimented former secretary of state Hillary Clinton as a smart and tough person “who has been in the public eye for a long time”. He suggested this might be a weakness. “In a culture in which new is always better you know, you’re always looking at the bright, shiny object that people don’t, haven’t seen before.” Like Bernie Sanders.
But Bernie Sanders is not exactly a spring chicken. Sanders has been harping on economic inequality since he first mounted his quixotic campaigns for office in Vermont during his hippie days in the 1970s. As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he took time away from hassling the city council to expound about the 3% of Americans who had all the wealth. By 1996, running for re-election to Congress, Sanders had started fingering the 1% of super-rich Americans, decades before the Occupy Wall Street activists popularized the term.
Beyond Bernie Sanders, the rhetoric he repeats over and again in Iowa and New Hampshire is as bright and shiny as an old copper penny. It’s the same language used by American populists like 19th century presidential candidate Williams Jennings Bryant, storied Louisiana governor Huey Long and former New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Teddy Roosevelt used his presidential “bully pulpit” to rail against the inordinate power of big banks and corporations.
t’s ridiculous if these powerful qualities – in short supply in Washington, by any account – are written off with a wave of a hand. It’s patronizing to suggest that voters are like children in a toy store, looking for a blinking, attention-grabbing, plaything.
If Bernie Sanders’ campaign has proven anything, it is that there are millions of citizens who are engaged, invested and closely scrutinizing the policy positions of all of the candidates in the electoral field. If Sanders can bring new voters to the polls with his message of authenticity and empowerment – as he seems to be doing – that’s a testament to the power of his words rather than their shiny quality.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders contends his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination would succeed even if he fails to prevail in the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, saying in an interview with The Associated Press he is prepared to go the distance against front-runner Hillary Clinton.
"If I lose Iowa by two votes and end up with virtually the same number of delegates, is that a must-lose situation? Is that a tragedy? No," Sanders said aboard a charter flight en route to Duluth, Minnesota, where he spoke at a rally with 6,000 supporters. "We are running a campaign that will take us to the convention and I'm very proud of the kinds of enormous gains we have made."
Sanders has said previously that he could win Iowa but his comments suggested an attempt to lower expectations in the final week before the caucuses. Asked if the Iowa contest is a must-win, he responded: "That's mythology."
Sanders told reporters earlier in the day in Des Moines that if he could generate large turnout among non-traditional voters, young people and workers, he could claim victory.
"We will win here in Iowa if the voter turnout is high and frankly if the voter turnout is not high we're going to be struggling," he said.
The Democratic upstart—who is in a tight battle with Hillary Clinton in several of the early primaries, according to several recent polls—on Sunday kicked off a nine-day Snapchat ad campaign specifically targeted at voters in Iowa.
In this case, during the final countdown to the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, the Sanders campaign is running a new geofilter ad on Snapchat everyday. On Monday, the geofilter ads read “Feel The Bern: One Week Until Caucus Night!”, while Wednesday’s ad reads “Feel The Bern in 5 Days!”
People who are in Iowa can impose one of the signature phrases over a video and share it on the social platform. The hope is that Snapchat users will help spread the message to a wider social audience.
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Mr. Sanders is the first Democratic candidate to advertise on Snapchat, and this will be the first time Snapchat has run a geofilter campaign for this many days in a row.
“We’re leveraging Snapchat to help us turn out young caucusgoers in Iowa who know Sen. Sanders is the best candidate to make college affordable, fight climate change and take on a corrupt political system,” said Kenneth Pennington, Mr. Sanders’ digital director, in an emailed statement.
Clearly, presidential candidates see Snapchat’s as a key place to advertise and maintain an organic presence, given its huge youthful audience. The messaging app, which lets people send short video messages to each other that disappear, claims to have 100 million unique people using it each day.
Jane Sanders, the wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has had a grueling schedule, standing alongside her husband at his campaign rallies, and hosting events of her own, schmoozing with voters. Now, with the Iowa caucuses less than a week away, it’s crunch time.
“I do whatever Bernie needs,” she told The Huffington Post. “Mostly what I have been doing is staying by his side. Going with him, participating in these events.”
Her role extends far beyond simply being a supportive partner. She is also her husband of 27 years' most trusted adviser and has led him to past political victories. With the exception of Bill Clinton, Jane Sanders may be the most politically experienced spouse in the 2016 cycle, even sharing an office with her husband at the campaign’s headquarters in Burlington, Vermont.
Sanders’ warm and personal approach to politics differentiates her from her husband, who is often completely focused on the issues.
“The yin and the yang -- he and I balance each other," Sanders said. "We have different approaches. I’m more social than he is, he is much more cerebral. He thinks things through, I feel things through.”
Sporadic gusts of cold January wind were blowing from the northeast when the first evening rush-hour commuter train pulled into the Chappaqua station.
A small gaggle of young people gathered in the dimly lit overpass, unified in their support for the one man in America who must be giving Hillary Clinton a bad case of hives — Bernie Sanders.
Chappaqua has been Bill-and-Hillary Country ever since 1999, when the couple bought a comfortable domicile at 15 Old House Lane for $1.7 million and became the darlings of Westchester’s suburban Democratic establishment. “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” Hillary recalled years later, an oddly disconnected remark that garnered much less sympathy than ridicule.
So, in a manner of speaking, the Sanders volunteers were ensconced in the belly of the beast, which was the whole point.
As train after train pulled into the Chappaqua station, they enthusiastically handed out “Bernie 2016 For President” palm cards, their spirits buoyed by astonishing poll numbers showing Sanders ahead of Clinton by 8 percentage points in Iowa and 23 points in New Hampshire. More than a few of the off-loading commuters ignored them and briskly walked by, but many politely accepted the cards, which listed 18 tenets of the insurgent Sanders campaign — starting with raising the minimum wage to $15 and ending with “Break up the Big Banks.”
The “Bernistas” believe Clinton is out of touch with those living on the outer edges of wealth and power, people who feel disenfranchised. While Clinton’s demographics skew past the age of 45, the septuagenarian Sanders is practically a millennial folk hero.
Not long ago, the best Bernie Sanders could hope for from US trade unions was to slow the inevitable tide of their endorsements for Hillary Clinton.
At a crunch meeting last July with labor leaders at the AFL-CIO summer conference in Maryland, the Vermont senator impressed many with his opposition to trade liberalisation, but was seen as too risky a bet by most of Washington’s union power-brokers.
Flash forward six months to the surprisingly tight race against Clinton in Iowa, and Sanders still only has formal backing from a handful of national unions – but increasingly it does not matter.
In a stark illustration of his argument that revolutionary political change can only come from below, a growing number of local union chapters are choosing to ignore their national leadership and back Sanders on the ground instead.
The “Grassroots for Sanders” campaign organized around an online message board has raised over $1 million for Bernie Sanders.
The board, with over 150,000 subscribers, is a subsection of the online discussion site Reddit, which allows users to organize around topics. A Montpelier-based former grape picker, Aidan King, started the Sanders for President board in 2013, alongside David Fredrick. King now works with the campaign as a digital organizer.
Over $50,000 of the million came in during the 48-hour period surrounding Sanders' appearance on CNN's Democratic town hall forum, which aired Monday night. It took the board six months to raise its first half-million, but only about a month to raise the second.
Beyond the money, Sanders’ digital warriors have made over 50,000 calls to voters in New Hampshire, Iowa and other states. The subreddit has hosted the site’s signature “Ask Me Anything” posts with other candidates that embody Sanders’ “political revolution,” including a law professor from Florida who is challenging Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Online, Reddit users have posted creative calls to motivate the community to donate. After Sanders released an ad set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” community members urged each other to donate $17.76. Other users offered to match donations.
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