I cannot agree with the diary currently on the recommended list that claims Sanders walked back his slander of Hillary Clinton. That was no walk back. It was a mealy-mouthed way to avoid any responsibility for basing a judgment on a lie. He probably makes Donald Trump proud.
Let’s look at exactly what Sanders said:
"Secretary Clinton appears to be getting a little bit nervous….And she has been saying lately that she thinks that I am quote unquote not qualified to be president.”
I’m not sure what other people think the term “quote unquote” means but I always thought that means the person is repeating word-for-word what another person has said. As many people have already shown, Hillary never said he was unqualified. She did say the following “quote unquotes” in reference to his clusterfuck of an interview with the New York Daily News in which he couldn’t explain how he would realistically break up banks that are too-large-to-fail:
“the interview raised a lot of really serious questions”
”it didn't seem in reading his answers that he understood exactly how that would work under Dodd-Frank and exactly who would be responsible, what the criteria were; and that means you really can't help people if you don’t know how to do what you are campaigning on saying you want to do.:
”Well, I think he hadn't done his homework and he'd been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn't really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions and really what it goes to is for voters to ask themselves, can he deliver what he's talking about, can he really help people—
“I think that what he has been saying about the core issue in his whole campaign doesn't seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done.”
Everything she said in her interview about his interview were exactly spot-on: breaking up the banks is a core issue of his campaign, he is making expansive promises concerning this issue, and he is not providing a path forward for achieving this extremely important promise. Sanders did not do his homework. Period.
Let’s forget about what his campaign managers and supporters want to read into this interview, which was that, because she didn’t explicitly say he was qualified, she was saying he was unqualified. No, she made the very direct — and correct — assertions that he talked a good game and makes huge promises but he provides no way to deliver.
So, what does Sanders do? Sanders — who walks on water according to his supporters, who Susan Sarandon said has “no ego” in the game, who claims he campaigns on issues and does not negatively campaign — blames the media because he was too goddamn lazy to read beyond a sensational and incorrect title of a Washington Post article. If Sanders has as much character as he and his people claim, he would do the standup thing and admit that, in fact, his ego and nervousness — which he himself projects onto Hillary — made him attack her personally and that he acted like a Trump-like big child. He would admit that he lowered the discourse in this campaign and will try to claim some of the moral high ground that he has very much lost.
The longer Sanders keeps pointing fingers and blaming everyone but himself, the longer he remains morphed into little more than a Trumpian figure.