Hillary Clinton has a great resume to submit in support of her application for the job of President of the United States. I don’t think any rational person would dispute that, and Bernie Sanders is a rational person, regardless of what his detractors might say.
In that sense, Clinton is indisputably qualified to be president. If you interpret Sanders’s recent comments as disputing that basic fact, of course you will be outraged (if you are a Clinton supporter) and think it was a stupid thing to say (regardless of who you support).
But I never did think that’s what Bernie was saying, and I still don’t. I’ve listened to the videos and read the transcripts, and unless I’m missing something, Bernie has never said Clinton is “unqualified.” He has, rather, suggested the possibility that she is “not qualified.”
Same thing, you say.
Well, no.
Let me first disclose that I am a word fanatic. Spelling words, reading them, writing & editing them, playing computer games and board games based on them, doing New York Times crosswords in ink, learning about etymology, arguing about shades of meaning — these things have been part of my lifesblood for as long as I can remember. While they bring me hours of great joy, they have also been the frequent source of friction with others, particularly family members who, inexplicably, do not share my fascination with every detail of syntax.
The point is, not many people pay the same obsessive attention to words that I do. And that may be why the Sanders campaign hasn’t responded to this whole “qualification” brouhaha with what seems to me to be the obvious, and dispositive, answer.
Lance Armstrong is no longer qualified to participate in the Tour de France. Pete Rose is not qualified to be in the Hall of Fame. Vanessa Williams, it turned out, was not qualified to complete her term as Miss America.
Nobody with any sense would argue that these individuals were unqualified for the specified honors.
Rather, in each case, these eminently qualified individuals disqualified themselves by their own actions. To say that Armstrong is not qualified to participate in the Tour de France does not mean one is dissing the skills and talents he brought to bicycle racing. But that isn’t all he brought.
Clearly, Hillary Clinton is not unqualified for the Presidency. But if you are Bernie Sanders, or anyone who shares Bernie’s political priorities, you might very well think that some of Hillary’s actions and perspectives have disqualified her from that office according to the policy criteria by which you judge such things.
I don’t personally share that belief. If you’ve paid any attention to what I’ve written this primary season (or in 2008, for that matter), you know that not one microdrop of my love is wasted on Hillary. But I wouldn’t frame my lack of support for her in terms of her being disqualified — even if some of my fellow Bernie supporters would disagree with me on that.
I don’t think Bernie himself would disagree with me, btw. From the outset that whole “might not be qualified” riff in his speech sounded like nothing more than a rhetorical flourish that got away from him in a big way. His remarks today reinforced that view.