Sanders’s New York Daily News Interview Was Not the Disaster Pundits Would Have You Believe.

Wisconsin aside, Tuesday’s Bernie Sanders news largely centered around an interview the candidate did with The New York Daily News editorial board.

Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post called it “pretty close to a disaster.” The Post’s Jonathan Capehart gave us a list of nine things Sanders should have known, but did not. And over at The Atlantic, David A. Graham suggested that the interview reveals that Sanders is campaigning for a position more akin to ideologue in chief than chief executive of the United States.

In broad strokes, many of the criticisms are fair. Sanders does not in fact seem to know “what happened with Metropolitan Life” — that the company challenged Federal regulators’ decision to impose a “too big to fail” label on it, and that last week, it won.

Sanders is in fact vague on his positions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and does at one point say that without his notes in front of him, he cannot answer how far he would ask Israel to pull back their settlements in the West Bank as part of a peace negotiation.

But here’s the thing: as much as some of Sanders’s answers to the New York Daily News were actually insufficient, others were made to seem insufficient by pundits selectively reporting on the interview after the fact.

To offer one example, Chris Cillizza reproduces this exchange between the editorial board and Sanders about how he “would break up the biggest banks”:

Daily News: So if you look forward, a year, maybe two years, right now you have … JPMorgan has 241,000 employees. About 20,000 of them in New York. $192 billion in net assets. What happens? What do you foresee? What is JPMorgan in year two of …

Sanders: What I foresee is a stronger national economy. And, in fact, a stronger economy in New York State, as well. What I foresee is a financial system which actually makes affordable loans to small and medium-size businesses. Does not live as an island onto themselves concerned about their own profits. And, in fact, creating incredibly complicated financial tools, which have led us into the worst economic recession in the modern history of the United States.

Daily News: I get that point. I’m just looking at the method because, actions have reactions, right? There are pluses and minuses. So, if you push here, you may get an unintended consequence that you don’t understand. So, what I’m asking is, how can we understand? If you look at JPMorgan just as an example, or you can do Citibank, or Bank of America. What would it be? What would that institution be? Would there be a consumer bank? Where would the investing go?

Sanders: I’m not running JPMorgan Chase or Citibank.

It is, Cillizza writes, an instance of the Daily News “pressing Sanders for specifics and asking him to evaluate the consequences of his proposals, and Sanders, largely, dodging as he sought to scramble back to his talking points.”

But if we look at the next exchange in the interview — which Cillizza fails to reproduce — the picture changes:

Daily News: No. But you’d be breaking it up.

Sanders: That’s right. And that is their decision as to what they want to do and how they want to reconfigure themselves. That’s not my decision. All I am saying is that I do not want to see this country be in a position where it was in 2008, where we have to bail them out. And, in addition, I oppose that kind of concentration of ownership entirely.

You’re asking a question, which is a fair question. But let me just take your question and take it to another issue. Alright? It would be fair for you to say, “Well, Bernie, you got on there that you are strongly concerned about climate change and that we have to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel. What happens to the people in the fossil fuel industry?”

That’s a fair question. But the other part of that is if we do not address that issue the planet we’re gonna leave your kids and your grandchildren may not be a particularly healthy or habitable one. So I can’t say, if you’re saying that we’re going to break up the banks, will it have a negative consequence on some people? I suspect that it will. Will it have a positive impact on the economy in general? Yes, I think it will.

Indeed, Sanders is still not offering a plan for what JPMorgan should do with the employees who would be harmed by breaking up the company. But he offers a pretty strong explanation as to why.

First he tells us that how JPMorgan might reconfigure itself, beyond the specifics of a break-up order from the Treasury Department, is not a matter for the President to decide — it’s a matter internal to the company.

Then he tells us that the question itself misses the point, and his analogy to regulating the fossil fuel industry illustrates why: if we take measures to mitigate climate change — or in this case Wall Street abuses — any loss of jobs will be tragic. But given that both pose a serious threat to our collective well-being, it seems very much like causing some small amount of misery to prevent a much greater misery is a worthwhile trade.

Perhaps we can offer Wall-Street traders a job retraining program, like we do when manufacturing plants close down and those positions move overseas.

The point is that Cillizza uses this as an opportunity to tell us that Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have been right all along — that when Sanders’s “pie-in-the-sky proposals are closely examined,” they are undoubtedly “found wanting.”

Or as David Graham has it in The Atlantic, the interview reveals that Sanders is “a far defter diagnostician than clinician,” and that when he gets down to policies, “Sanders is offering a deeply unrealistic program.”

But does the interview actually reveal that? Does it suggest anything about his policies at all?

We might consider it this way instead: what if Sanders, upon being pressed about how he would institute his agenda, had told The New York Daily News editorial board that as President, he would use the bully pulpit as best he could, but that legislative matters are a process of negotiation with the legislative branch in the end? Had he said to the editorial board that his positions are starting points for a policy discussion, but that laws would need to be hammered out with the Republican House of Representatives, what would the headlines about the interview have been like then?

Would The Washington Post now be running opinion pieces about how Sanders is shying away from his radical positions in a desperate attempt to court the center? Would The Atlantic run a story about how disappointing it is that Sanders is exactly the kind of career politician he accuses Hillary Clinton of being?

Bernie Sanders’s interview with the Daily News was not so much a near-disaster as it was a no-win scenario. Because he stuck to his talking points, he is portrayed by the media as all bluster and no substance. But had he done anything else, he would have been portrayed as an establishment politician surrounded by a brittle veneer of radicalism.

And ultimately, that reflects much more on publications like The Washington Post and The Atlantic than it does on Sanders himself. Sure, his interview certainly did have its weak points. But the fact is that there is a certain class of pundits out there who are looking for reasons to dismiss a Sanders candidacy. And no matter what Sanders had said on Tuesday, the stories from those pundits would be the same: disappointment, and another point scored for the Democratic establishment.