Obama Campaign Architect Messina: Sanders, Clinton Will Unite

 Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are friends and will eventually get together about uniting the party to go against Donald Trump, Barack Obama's 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina said Wednesday.

"The way you should do this, do it the way Hillary Clinton did in 2008," Messina, who co-chairs Priorities USA Action, the main super-PAC supporting Clinton, told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on the "Andrea Mitchell Reports" program.

"She got out out of the race the day after the [last] primary [and] she immediately endorsed [Obama] at the time."

Campaigns are "like war," Messina continued, but Clinton and Sanders served together in the Senate for a very long time and they are friends.

"Someone will sit them down and they'll have a conversation about their shared goals and their absolute commitment to making sure that a Democrat replaces Barack Obama in the White House," said Messina, who served as Obama's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations from 2009-2011. "I think you're going to see a really united party to go against Donald Trump."

And even though Sanders has been an independent as senator, "he's committed to the values that he and Hillary just campaigned on for a year and a half," said Messina.

"You look at their policy differences, they're not very big. They have a shared goal to make this country better, to protect the economic gains we've made under President Obama," Messina said. "I know Bernie well from my time working in the Senate and there's no way he's going to want to do anything that would accidentally help elect Donald Trump to be president of the United States of America."

Obama will meet with Sanders on Thursday, and Messina expects the president to first congratulate the senator for his own "historic campaign," and then will encourage him to work to "make sure we win in November and protect the gains the president and Sanders and Secretary Clinton all spent the last eight years fighting for."

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