Fresh from a campaign victory in Wyoming, Bernie Sanders double-teamed the Sunday morning talk shows, appearing on two of them to promote his campaign’s strength against frontrunner Hillary Clinton, whose experience Sanders called into question last week.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” moderator John Dickerson held Sanders’ feet to the fire on the question of Clinton’s qualifications to be president, which Sanders disputed last week at a campaign rally in Philadelphia.
“Where are we on the question whether Hillary Clinton is qualified to be President?” Dickerson asked. “You said she was and then you said she wasn’t. Give us the bottom line.”
“Well, we were attacked pretty harshly by the Clinton campaign, who suggested that I was not qualified,” Sanders said, citing Clinton as “a candidate who receives an enormous amount of money from special interests, a candidate who voted for the war in Iraq, a candidate who voted for virtually every disastrous trade policy which have cost us millions of jobs.”
“But, John, I want to get away from this stuff. I respect Hillary Clinton. I’ve known her for 25 years. What I want is a debate about the real issues impacting the middle class of this country. Look, she has enormous experience. Everybody who knows her knows that she is very intelligent. But I think her judgment, you know, for example, on foreign policy, let’s be clear, the war in Iraq was the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of America.”
Sanders discussed his own campaign’s momentum and its mathematically challenging path to winning the nomination.
“If you look at national polling where we started this campaign, we were 60 points down, some of the recent polls actually have us … ahead of Secretary Clinton. … I am feeling really great. And I believe that we have a real path to victory.”
“Let’s talk about that path to victory,” Dickerson said. “[Y]ou still have to make up that deficit in pledged delegates that Hillary Clinton has. And so the people who look at the math here say that that path requires you to have — you really need really, really big wins. Do you think that’s probable?”
Sanders said, “We have cut her lead by a third in the last three or so weeks. I think we’re now 214 delegates behind. We used to be more than 300 delegates behind. We’ve got some big states coming up. … We’re out of the south now. We’re heading to New York. We’re heading west. And I think you’re going to see us do very, very well in many of those states.”