Sanders Joins Clinton in New Hampshire; Obama Hosts CNN Town Hall
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Today, Hillary Clinton heads to Iowa the same day early voting kicks off in that state. No coincidence. As of today, 11 states are already voting. But Iowa is the first to offer in-person polling stations. Secretary Clinton is getting more help on the campaign trail from her former rival Bernie Sanders. She needs his help to reel in unenthusiastic millennial voters. CNN's Jeff Zeleny is with the Clinton campaign.</s>JEFF ZELENY, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: John and Christine, Hillary Clinton is heading to Iowa today, only the second time returning to the state since winning the Iowa caucuses back in February. She is going to Des Moines because it is early voting today. Voting is starting for the first time, heading now until Election Day, some 40 days away. Now, the Clinton campaign is running behind in Iowa. Donald Trump visited on Wednesday. But she is trying to use on the ground campaign and early votes to make up the difference. She is seeking young voters, among all. That is the biggest bloc of the Obama coalition that she has yet to win over. Now, she was campaigning on Wednesday in that other early voting state, New Hampshire. She had Bernie Sanders at her side. He made this argument to voters.</s>SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (D), FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: So, I am asking you here today, not only to vote for Secretary Clinton, but to work hard to get your uncles and your aunts, to get your friends to vote. If anybody tells you that this election is not important, you ask why the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and other billionaires, why they are spending hundreds of millions to elect their candidates.</s>ZELENY: Now, Senator Sanders campaign will be campaigning aggressively in the final month of this campaign. Aides to the senator tell me he will head to Wisconsin and Michigan and other states he won in the hard fought Democratic primary campaign, trying to rally those young voters, those millennial voters. This is why it matters. Millennials now out-pace baby boomers, except they don't always vote. And some are turning towards the third party candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. The Clinton campaign is trying to win them over. They are so critical to building that path to 270 electoral votes when the real election day, November 8, comes around -- John and Christine.</s>BERMAN: All right. Our thanks to Jeff Zeleny, for that. Joining us now, the managing editor of CNN politics digital, Zachary Wolf. Mr. Wolf, you know, Bernie Sanders out with Hillary Clinton targeting millennial voters. Michelle Obama at La Salle University in Philadelphia, targeting millennials. By the way, Joe Biden was at Drexel. I think Hillary Clinton was at Temple. They are blanketing colleges in Philadelphia and I don't think it's a coincidence, right? They need to target millennials voters. And as for the message from the first lady, she went after Donald Trump yesterday. Listen to this.</s>MICHELLE OBAMA, FIRST LADY: If a candidate thinks that not paying taxes makes you smart or that it's good business when people lose their homes, if a candidate regularly and flippantly makes cruel and insulting comments about women, about how we look, how we act -- well, sadly that's who that candidate really is.</s>BERMAN: It's really where she is saying it, at a college. Who Hillary Clinton is with, Bernie Sanders, it tells you everything you need to know, Zach, about where the Clinton campaign thinks they are soft right now -- with young people.</s>ZACHARY WOLF, CNN POLITICS DIGITAL MANAGING EDITOR: That's right. It has been a problem for them since the primaries when a lot of young people or most young people, not most, but Bernie Sanders did better than her time and again with young people, with millennials. And her strategy from the beginning of the campaign is to get out that Obama coalition and big part of that is young people. So, you're going to see Michelle Obama, Bernie Sanders, all these people blanketing college campuses trying to get young people interested and excited to vote for her. That's the area where she's really lagged.</s>ROMANS: You know, and they are seeing this attention rising in the polls in the third party candidates. Last night, we hear on MSNBC, another Aleppo gaffe, or Aleppo worthy gaffe. Listen to this.</s>CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC MODERATOR: Name a foreign leader that you respect.</s>GARY JOHNSON, LIBERTARIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I guess I'm having an Aleppo moment in the former president of Mexico.</s>MATTHEWS: But I'm giving you the whole world.</s>JOHNSON: I know, I know.</s>MATTHEWS: Anybody in the world you like. Anybody. Pick any leader.</s>JOHNSON: The former president of Mexico.</s>MATTHEWS: Which one?</s>JOHNSON: I'm having a brain --</s>MATTHEWS: Well, name anybody.</s>BILL WELD, LIBERTARIAN VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Fox.</s>JOHNSON: Fox.</s>MATTHEWS: Name your favorite foreign leader.</s>JOHNSON: Fox He was terrific.</s>MATTHEWS: Any foreign leader.</s>WELD: Merkel.</s>MATTHEWS: Merkel, OK, fine, save yourself. Can't argue with that.</s>ROMANS: So, Zach, how does he recover from that? Two big gaffes. He has been doing better in the polls.</s>WOLF: Well, he is kind of the only other candidate in the race on all 50 ballots. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, is not. There are some states where she will not be on the ballot. So, Gary Johnson, if you don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump, Gary Johnson is pretty much it for a lot of people in all the states. Now, that said, you know, he could have said any number of things. He could have said, I don't think there is another libertarian leader I like. There's not another libertarian president in a foreign country. He's sort of found a way to recover from that. He has shown himself to be good in the hot-seat moments. Chris Matthews was doing his best to make that a hot seat.</s>BERMAN: I don't think this was a gotcha question. Name one human being on earth outside this country that you respect and Gary Johnson couldn't come up with one. He's uncomfortable with that video we showed you. You know, if you let it out long, it is more uncomfortable. That is the nice version for Gary Johnson right there. Donald Trump after Hillary Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia and after she left the 9/11 ceremony and the video where she almost to fall over, almost collapsed there, he was careful to not talk about it. After the first debate, that seems to have changed. Listen to what he said in Iowa overnight.</s>DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You sell the days off that Hillary takes. Day off. Day off. Day off. All those days off and then she can't make it to her car. Isn't it tough?</s>BERMAN: So you put this in with some new rhetoric we're getting from the Donald Trump team. They are really going after Hillary Clinton hard these last few days, going after Bill Clinton and his marital indiscretions hard the last few days. And it begs a question, you know, what are they doing after this first debate leading up to the second debate? Why does their tone seem to have changed?</s>WOLF: I think because he lost the first debate by most reasonable measures. They need to find a way to change things. I will fact check you a little bit there. He did not talk about her health right after her spell there. The whole reason we were talking about her health is because Trump's campaign and other Republicans had the sort of whisper thing leading up to that. So, they helped sort of create the questions in some ways, to create that issue in ways. Now, you know, for this next campaign, they have said that, you know, they suggested, I think, they will go at her more personally. They will go at her relationship with her husband. You know, these are things that bring back the '90s and bring back all of the questions that people have about Hillary Clinton and still her big weakness is her trustworthiness. And will this get at that? So, I think that's probably where they will go.</s>BERMAN: All right. Zach Wolf, consider myself fact checked and chastened at the same time, great to have you with us.</s>ROMANS: I love -- fact-checking John Berman at 5:00 a.m. is one of my favorite things to do. All right. Thanks, Zach. Talk to you in a few minutes. Thank you. All right. Seven minutes past the hour. Families of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks are now legally free to sue Saudi Arabia. Both chambers of Congress voting overwhelming to override President Obama's veto of the Saudi lawsuit bill. It's the first time the president has suffered a veto override since he took office. At a CNN town hall last night, he blamed politics for the setback, although lawmakers from both parties opposed him.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'm concerned and this is not just my concern. General Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said it was a bad idea. Secretary of defense said it was a bad idea. And then we found out, some of the people who voted for it said, frankly, we didn't know what was in it, and there was no debate. And it was basically a political vote.</s>ROMANS: The president's press secretary called the Senate's override the single most embarrassing thing the Senate has done since 1983. That suggestion is provoking anger from some Democrats, with one aide calling the moment amateur hour at the White House.</s>BERMAN: So, the president made his remarks about the Saudi Arabia lawsuit bill during the CNN town hall. The event took place at a U.S. Army Post in Ft. Lee, Virginia. The audience made up mostly of military families. They have plenty to say to the president. CNN's Michelle Kosinski was there.</s>MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Hi, John and Christine. Yes, this was different. I mean, I think this is the first time in recent memory that things did not just immediately turn to politics. Not one of these questions was about Donald Trump. In fact, it was emotional. I mean, listen to this, from a wife of a veteran who died after waiting more than a year for a colonoscopy at a V.A. medical center.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When are we going to actually start holding these contracted doctors and V.A. employees accountable? It is the difference between life and death.</s>OBAMA: We actually made progress. Again, I don't want to pretend we are anywhere we need to be, but, you know, we have in fact fired a bunch of people who were in charge of some of these facilities. I don't know the particular case of this individual doctor, but you can bet I'll find out after this meeting.</s>KOSINSKI: This wasn't exactly an easy crowd for the president either. I mean, when you look at recent polls among U.S. service members, it shows that their approval rating for the president is around 15 percent to 30 percent. And they chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton two to one. Also, about 1/5 of troops surveyed said when they had to choose between two candidates, they don't want to vote at all. They don't feel like either major party has their best interest in mind. So, part of President Obama's goal here was to show that his administration cares and that their policies support the military -- John and Christine.</s>ROMANS: All right. Michelle in Virginia for us -- thank you. So, in California, protesters ignoring calls for calm after a deadly police shooting of an African-American man. What police just revealed about the investigation. What the man was holding in his hand. We now know after the break.