Oh lord, when will the spinning and rationalizations of Bernie’s blunders end??? Every one of Bernie's missteps that he and his campaign staff have committed over the past couple of weeks were unforced errors, totally of his own making.
He should have prepared better for his interview with the New York Daily News. Running for president requires that you actually know the answers to questions about your own policies, that you don't sound confused and unsure about how those policies will affect the lives of the people you're asking to vote for you and that you at least pretend to have some interest in and knowledge of foreign policy. No matter how you Bernie die-hards try to frame it, he had a disastrous performance with the editorial board of that paper and it literally buried the story he would have rather been talking about, his enormous win in Wisconsin.
Then, if that wasn't bad enough, Bernie went off like a skyrocket on Hillary Clinton, ranting that she was unqualified to be president. This unprecedented attack was brought on by the Washington Post's misleading headline that Hillary had questioned Bernie's qualifications to be president. Bernie could have avoided the whole ugly mess if he had just bothered to read the article, or had his staff read it. I suspect his staff had read it, and didn't tell him that Hillary hadn't actually questioned whether he was qualified. They have been hammering at him to come down much harder on Clinton for months and showing him the headline without telling him what the article said was a surefire guarantee that he would do it. To make matters worse, he stuck to his "she's not qualified" guns for two days while Hillary acted gracious and refused to be drawn into the fight. In the end, the blowback from women and Democrats who just want to win in November was so bad, he was forced to retract his statement and say that Mrs. Clinton was qualified after all.
Finally we have this whole "the Pope invited Bernie to the Vatican" fiasco. Bernie's team and Bernie himself went on TV and to the print press touting his invitation by Pope Francis to meet in the Vatican, a story that's turned out to be patently untrue. There is an academic conference hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences taking place at the Vatican next week but it has nothing to do with Pope Francis and he won't be there. Furthermore, Bernie's aides reached out to a contact in the Vatican and asked for the invitation to that conference and it came apparently from a Bishop Sorondo. Unfortunately the good Bishop issued the invitation in the name of Margaret Archer, the chief organizer of the conference without asking her if this was something she and the other organizers wanted to do. As a result, Ms. Archer is more than a little upset and accusing the Sanders campaign of trying to play politics with her conference. One can only assume that this ill-conceived plan was hatched to pander to the many Catholic voters in New York, but it has backfired big time with everyone involved in the conference, and the Vatican itself royally pissed off. How did he and his campaign not foresee that this kind of blatant political maneuver would blow up in his face? Isn't Bernie supposed to be above such things?
I know that there is not one single thing I've said that will make a dent in the Bernie or Bust support he receives from the true believers. For the rest of us, it’s getting harder and harder to see him in the White House.