Sanders reads

Bernie Sanders reads out his call with President Obama

By Tyler Pager

Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke with President Barack Obama on Tuesday night, he told delegates at a breakfast at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday morning.

Sanders said he had repeated his message about the need for more progress while praising Obama for the work he has done over the past eight years.

“What I told him is what I said publicly,” he said. “Of course, as a nation we are much, much better off today than we were when [President George W.] Bush left office and we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. But of course that’s true: We had a $1.4 trillion deficit when Bush left office and the world’s financial system -- Republicans seem to forget about that -- was on the verge of collapse. That’s what Obama inherited. Are we better off today? Of course we are, but it is not good enough.”

Sanders then went on to discuss the policies that he wants to see enacted, namely raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The Vermont senator hasn’t always praised Obama, though -- a fact Hillary Clinton's campaign skillfully exploited during the Democratic primary, noting repeatedly that Sanders had floated the idea of a primary challenger in 2011.

Sanders eventually endorsed the president's re-election bid, but he told CNN at the time: “I think Obama is by far the preferable candidate. Is Obama doing everything I want? Absolutely not, and among other things, he has not been as strong as he should standing up to Wall Street.”

“The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president, I expect from Republicans,” Clinton said during the Democratic debate in Milwaukee. “I do not expect from someone running for the Democratic nomination to succeed President Obama.”

That was a "low blow," Sanders said, noting that he had cooperated with the president for 7 years.

“One of us ran against Barack Obama,” he shot back. “I was not that candidate.”