You know that feeling when you walk out of a job interview and you just know you nailed it?
Well, let’s just say Bernie Sanders wasn’t feeling that one bit.
The Vermont senator, who met with the New York Daily News editorial board in an effort to secure the paper’s endorsement, is being mocked by the media on Tuesday for his less than substantive answers, after transcripts of the interview were released by the paper.
Though Sanders has made inequality and Wall Street regulation the central theme of his populist message, he didn’t quite have the specifics on what he would do to fix the problem.
Sanders seemed to flounder when asked to explain the exact laws he would use to break up “too big to fail” banks during his first year in office, something he has promised repeatedly during his stump speeches.
Here’s an example pulled from the transcripts:
Daily News: And then, you further said that you expect to break them up within the first year of your administration. What authority do you have to do that? And how would that work? How would you break up JPMorgan Chase?
Sanders: Well, by the way, the idea of breaking up these banks is not an original idea. It’s an idea that some conservatives have also agreed to.
You’ve got head of, I think it’s, the Kansas City Fed, some pretty conservative guys, who understands. Let’s talk about the merit of the issue, and then talk about how we get there. …
Daily News: Okay. Well, let’s assume that you’re correct on that point. How do you go about doing it?
Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.
Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?
Sanders: Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.
Things didn’t get much better after that.
The media seemed to have a field day with headlines ranging from Salon’s “That NYDN Bernie Interview Was Really Tough. Hillary Should Face One Too,” to The Washington Post’s “This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders.”
Zerlina Maxwell, the progressive outreach director for Clinton’s campaign, quickly pounced taking a shot at Sanders on Twitter saying the interview was “honestly stunning in a bad way.”
You can read the full transcript of Sanders interview with The Daily News here.