The time Obama jokingly dismissed Bernie Sanders as a communist

Republicans and Michael Bloomberg are not the only ones who have characterized Bernie Sanders as a communist.

President Barack Obama has done it, too, albeit with tongue-in-cheek.

Sanders is out this week with a new campaign ad tying himself closely to the former Democratic president. The new television spot, released after Super Tuesday, features archival footage of Obama lavishing praise upon the Vermont senator.

But things between Obama and Sanders have never been quite so rosy.

For starters, there is the rather uncomfortable fact that the senator in 2011 very seriously considered running in a primary against Obama, according to a Feb. 19 report by the Atlantic titled, “The Hidden History of Sanders’s Plot to Primary Obama.”

In 2013, Sanders repeatedly criticized the Democratic president, saying things such as, “I’m not Obama’s biggest fan.” Later, in 2016, Sanders blurbed a book that accused Obama of letting down the liberal base. That same year, Obama and Sanders had to have a sit-down after the president publicly criticized the senator’s primary campaign. And so on.

The relationship between the president and the senator became so “particularly fraught,” to borrow the Atlantic’s choice of words, that Obama himself brought it up during the 2016 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, taking an especially pointed swipe at Sanders’s reputation for being a left-wing radical.

“I am hurt, though, Bernie,” Obama told an adoring audience, “that you’ve been distancing yourself a little from me.”

He added to roars of laughter, “I mean, that’s just not something that you do to your comrade.”

It is a joke, yes, but it is also maybe just a little more pointed than that.

Obama’s dig at Sanders came amid the broader context of their constant sniping at one another and the fact that “Bernie Sanders got so close to running a primary challenge to President Barack Obama that Senator Harry Reid had to intervene to stop him,” according to the Atlantic.

“It took Reid two conversations over the summer of 2011 to get Sanders to scrap the idea, according to multiple people who remember the incident, which has not been previously reported,” the report adds.

Sure, Obama may have had nice words in the past for Sanders. But do not be fooled by a campaign ad into thinking their relationship was ever warm and cordial.

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