Obama's quiet strategy Welcome to the Maclean's Politics Insider: America 2020, launched for readers who crave U.S. political news during primary season. If you want to receive this new newsletter, take no action, it will arrive in your inbox every weekday at noon. If you'd rather not receive it, please unsubscribe here. Obama's wait-and-see strategy: Despite his ever-presence during the Democratic primary, Barack Obama has remained on the sidelines. While Obama's vice-president Joe Biden is making that Obama experience his main pitch to voters; others have criticized his presidency, implicitly or explicitly, as not being left-wing enough. Meanwhile, Obama declines to make an endorsement or even to say much of anything. Gabriel Debenedetti of New York magazine reports that Obama may be keeping silent because the primary may become a disaster, and he'll have to say something then: With the race looking more and more likely to grow bitter and messy, and maybe even wind up in a contested convention, the former president and those around him are increasingly sure he will need to play a prominent role in bringing the party back together and calming its tensions later this summer, including perhaps in Milwaukee, where the party’s meeting is scheduled to be held in July. Debenedetti's sources also assure him that Obama is not trying to stop Bernie Sanders from getting elected, and if Sanders winds up the nominee, Obama will be "all-in" for him. Bloomberg News and the conflict of interest: The Michael Bloomberg campaign is unprecedented on at least two fronts — how much of the candidate's own money is being spent, and also because this is the first time since 1904 that someone has run for president while also owning a major news service. How are the reporters and opinion columnists at Bloomberg News supposed to cover the man who is still their boss? "We always knew it would be tough," Bloomberg's editor-in-chief John Mickelthwait told his staff last December. Micklethwait had already sent a memo to his investigative reporters telling them to treat the Democratic candidates equally by not investigating any of them, and Bloomberg ominously told a CBS reporter that his staff just has to live with "restrictions and responsibilities" when it comes to their coverage. But journalists are also worried that a president Bloomberg would sell the service and cost them their jobs. So they have to hope, essentially, that Bloomberg will do the unethical thing. Bloomberg and Biden target Bernie fans: With media coverage increasingly portraying Bernie Sanders as the early front-runner and Bloomberg as the wild card, it was to be expected that the two men would start to take rhetorical shots at each other. What wasn't predictable was the Bloomberg campaign's first line of attack: after Sanders said Bloomberg wouldn't create the "energy and excitement" the party needs to defeat Trump, the Bloomberg campaign tweeted a video of unpleasant things Sanders staffers or supporters have said (mostly on Twitter) and declared that this is the kind of "energy" associated with the Sanders campaign. The ex-frontrunner, Joe Biden , also raised questions about Sanders supporters, calling some of them "Trump-like." How Sanders turned things around (for now): Whether or not Sanders wins the nomination, he's in a better position now than most people would have expected late last year, when he was behind Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren in most polls, and suffered a heart attack. CNN examined how the candidate managed to stage a comeback, and found several turning points, including the decision of the Democrats' star house member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to endorse Sanders over Warren shortly after Sanders' heart attack: according to Sanders' Iowa state director, AOC is popular with many Democratic-leaning women who decided they'd rather follow her lead, even if it means passing up the chance for the first woman president. —Jaime Weinman | 
