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AP Photo Obama sees his reluctance to endorse as good thing for Democratic Party

President Barack Obama isn't in any rush to endorse in the Democratic race, and he thinks his foot-dragging may be helping Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday that Obama hasn't ruled out endorsing, but that Obama himself was served well by a drawn-out primary race eight years ago.

"The Democratic candidates are likely to benefit from having a longer-than-expected campaign. That certainly was true when he ran in 2008,” Earnest said.

He added that the extra months of battling Clinton gave Obama and the party the chance to build a campaign apparatus in states where Democrats had not previously been competitive during a general election. He cited Indiana — a state a Democrat hadn’t won in decades before Obama did in 2008 — as an example.

A longer Democratic primary is “not necessarily bad news,” Earnest said. “I think that would also be part of the explanation for the president not weighing in in that race.”

While stopping short of formally endorsing, Obama has had more encouraging words for Clinton, his former secretary of state, than Sanders. The White House and Obama's former aides have chafed at Sanders' questioning of Obama's progressive credentials, though the two have said they are on friendly terms.

Earnest on Wednesday also weighed in on Tuesday's primaries in which Sanders extended the shelf life of his campaign by pulling out a win in Michigan.

He likened Tuesday’s results to this point during the 2008 Democratic primary, when then-Sen. Obama was challenging Clinton for the nomination. Clinton won the Ohio and Texas primaries but lost the Texas caucuses. “They have a rather peculiar system in Texas for choosing their delegates,” Earnest noted. But heading into those states, he said, the logic was that Obama could seal the contest with a win in either primary.

“There were many people who worried about the impact this would have on Democrats’ prospects in the general election,” said Earnest, who maintained that both Obama and Clinton “benefited significantly from that longer-than-expected campaign.”