Ravitch Labels Sanders Remarks "Dreadful and Petulant"

When Clinton lost the Wisconsin primary, her campaign devised a new strategy as they headed toward New York: paint Sanders as unqualified to be President.  The next day she launched the new smear tactics.  From WaPo:

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Wednesday questioned whether her rival in the Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), is qualified to be president.

"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," Clinton said in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," just one day after losing the Wisconsin primary to Sanders, "and that does raise a lot of questions." . . .

The Sanders campaign answered the same day:

"My response is if you want to question my qualifications, then maybe the American people might wonder about your qualifications Madame Secretary," he said. 

Sanders added: "When you voted for the war in Iraq, the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in the history of America, you might want to question your qualifications. When you voted for trade agreements that cost millions of Americans decent paying jobs, and the American people might want to wonder about your qualifications. When you're spending an enormous amount of time raising money for your super PAC from some of the wealthiest people in this country, and from some of the most outrageous special interests ... Are you qualified to be president of the United States when you're raising millions of dollars from Wall Street whose greed and recklessness helped destroy our economy?" 

Diane Ravitch waited a few days to offer this reaction to Bernie's response: "His statement that Hillary is 'not qualified' to be President was dreadful and petulant. Would he prefer Trump or Cruz?"  

It makes one wonder what Diane might advise Bernie to do when this kind of planned assault comes his way.  Is he supposed to pretend that Clinton is something she is not, for fear of further damaging the corporate Left's choice to run against the corporate Right in the general election?   

Bernie Sanders, like everyone else, knows that Clinton has the requisite experience to be President.  She has been privately tutored for years in the imperialistic and criminal foreign policy of Henry Kissinger.  She has learned from her husband and from Barack Obama and from Robert Rubin how to mouth the words of financial reform, while growing the "too big to fail" banks even bigger and ignoring their crimes against the citizenry.  She has learned how to aggressively pursue the corporate education reforms with enough vigor to please the hedge funds and the corporate union presidents--both superdelegates, I might add.  And she learned to frame the environmental crisis to fit the needs of her dirty energy contributors.

Diane Ravitch has been a conservative for so long that her brand of Republicanism, which was shed like an old snakeskin as her old neoconservative pals slithered further Right, is now worn by the DNC's centrist candidate, Hillary Clinton.  In the meantime, Ravitch's pretense that she remains neutral just underscores how content she is with the status quo.  I guess some things, indeed, never change.

Here is a clip from yesterday's Meet the Press, where Sanders updates his earlier remarks about Clinton vastness of experience that masks some very serious shortcomings.  In the end, if Bernie Sanders falls short of leading the political revolution under the Democratic banner, it surely will not be led by Hillary Clinton.  She will be as irrelevant as the official Republicans and their deserted followers that they left behind to become Democrats.