Bernie Sanders will return to Washington from the campaign trail. | Getty Obama to meet with Sanders

DECORAH, Iowa — Five days before the Iowa caucuses, where he’s running neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders will sit down with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office for a one-on-one meeting, the White House said Tuesday.

The Wednesday meeting — which White House press secretary Josh Earnest said came about after the president and candidate discussed it in December at the Congressional Holiday Ball — also comes just days after the publication of Obama’s most expansive comments on the 2016 race so far, in which he praised Sanders but rebutted parallels between the Vermont senator’s campaign and his own 2008 bid.


Sanders will return to Washington from the campaign trail — he held events in Iowa and Minnesota on Tuesday — before returning to Iowa for a campaign stop in Mason City on Wednesday night.

Obama and Clinton, his former secretary of state, have met on multiple occasions in the White House since she left the administration, but this meeting between Obama and Sanders is the first one the White House has specifically acknowledged between that pair.

For Sanders, the timing could be useful: The front-runner has gone to great lengths to tie herself to the president — who has an approval rating of 91 percent among Iowa Democrats — while suggesting that Sanders is out of step with the White House on a range of issues, including gun control. She even cheered the idea of appointing Obama to the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Sanders has also praised Obama, but a personal meeting so close to the caucuses could provide a useful anecdote on the trail.

