Sanders owes Clinton an apology for dig about her qualifications

Opinion: April 12, 2016 at 12:00a.m.

By Michael A. LINDENBERGER

The Dallas Morning News

It’s easy to say things you don’t mean in a heated political campaign. Hillary Clinton had her stumble when she praised, of all people, Nancy Reagan for her role in helping Americans confront the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. She quickly and thoroughly apologized.

Bernie Sanders should do the same, after extremely lame comments last week, when he told a cheering audience that Hillary Clinton is not “qualified” to be president.

Hillary Clinton, whether you loathe her or love her, is one of the most prepared candidates for the White House in our history. Plenty of people think she’d make a bad president. But no one has yet been able to make a straight-faced argument that what’s lacking are her qualifications.

I think women have heard this line long enough. One woman, Sen. Claire McCaskill, responded almost immediately on Twitter: “C’mon Bernie. Not qualified? Remember what we all have to do together in November.”

But it goes beyond gender issues, and Sanders ought to apologize straight away. But he probably won’t. It’s too bad, because while it remains very unlikely, he might actually be the party’s nominee by summer. If he is, these comments and his refusal to apologize will still be clinging to his image, like cigar smoke hours after the last ashtrays were emptied.

Free trade deals

In making his claim, Sanders said Clinton isn’t qualified for three reasons: Her support of free trade deals, the existence of SuperPacs that have raised millions to advance her campaign and her 2003 vote to authorize President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.

Let’s skip over the overly simplistic view on trade, and the twisted way he suggests Clinton has “taken” money from Super PACs, when he knows that isn’t true. But beyond all that, he ought to apologize because the argument is on its face absurd. On two of those points, our current president wouldn’t be qualified either.

He also should apologize because he prefaced his remarks on a false premise, and rather than admitting it this morning his campaign is digging in. It’s unnerving to watch.

“Now the other day, I think, Secretary Clinton appeared to be getting a little bit nervous,” Sanders told thousands at Philadelphia’s Temple University on Wednesday night, according to a report by ABC News. “And she has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote-unquote not qualified to be president.

“Well let me just say in response, to Secretary Clinton, I don’t believe that she is qualified if she is through her Super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds,” Sanders said. “I don’t think that you are qualified if you get 15 million dollars from Wall Street through your Super PAC. I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don’t think you are qualified if you’ve supported virtually every disastrous trade agreement, which has cost us millions of decent paying jobs.”

Sanders’ reliance on these same themes – Wall Street, free trade and a 13-year-old vote on the war – is beginning to show the narrowness of his vision. It’s as if he has been reduced to mere slogans, a view that was only reinforced by his disastrous interview with the New York Daily News editorial board last week.

It was that interview that raised the question of Sanders’ own qualification to be president. Earlier on last Wednesday, on “Morning Joe,” Clinton was repeatedly pressed on whether she thought Sanders is qualified, given his stumbling and vague responses in the interview with the editorial board.

She refused to say he is unqualified, and that’s why Sanders’ comments are dishonest and should be retracted. Sanders’ folks are sourcing his comments on a Washington Post headline that said she questioned his qualifications. But surely they read the story, too, and didn’t base a major attack on something they didn’t even read? Right? The story clearly reported that Clinton had not said he is “unqualified.”

Here’s what she did say:

“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,” said Clinton when asked pointedly if Sanders is not “ready” to be president.

“Well, let me put it this way, Joe. 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. And I will leave it to voters to decide who of us can do the job that the country needs,” she added.

Campaign low point

So now the campaigns and their proxies are growling over this latest campaign low point. Will it matter? Probably not for Clinton. The fact that Sanders said she is unqualified probably won’t hold much sway come November.

But for Sanders it was reckless, not only because it risked a backlash from her supporters, and not just because it hits on the core campaign message that he’s an honest campaigner. But reckless because of how high the stakes are in the race for the White House.

Surely, Sanders prefers Clinton to her Republican alternatives? Surely, he’d do everything he can to turn out his supporters to help her in the fall, should she win the nomination? Surely, he knows that his own chances of doing so remain small?

With those things in mind, his statements and his refusal to take them back call into question his own judgment.

For her part, Clinton’s response when asked about it in the New York City subway, was pitch perfect.

“I don’t know why he’s saying that. But I will take Bernie Sanders over Donald Trump or Ted Cruz any time.”

Senator Sanders, it’s going to take a big apology. You might as well get started making it. You will be glad you did, should you end up winning this race.

Michael A. Lindenberger is a member of the editorial board at the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC