Is Bernie Sanders ready for prime time?

Bernie Sanders had a very good election day on Tuesday, the latest in a string of them. He beat Hillary Clinton by about 13 percentage points in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, a larger-than-forecast margin of victory. If he wins the New York, Pennsylvania, and California primaries by such lopsided margins, he may well prove the pointy headed number-crunchers and corporate media pundits wrong, and seize the Democratic nomination.

But Sanders' great Tuesday shouldn't overshadow his less-glorious Monday, when the New York Daily News published the transcript of Sanders' April 1 interview with the paper's editorial board. Sanders was angling for the paper's endorsement before the New York primary on April 19, and the general consensus is that the chat, full of embarrassingly vague-sounding answers from the Vermont senator, did not go well for Sanders. A representative take, from The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza: It was "pretty close to a disaster."

The reason the interview is supposedly so devastating is that nationally, the knock against Sanders is that he has just a few issues he cares deeply about and articulates passionately, but that he is, in essence, a one-trick pony who now perhaps hasn't even thought through his one trick very deeply. "If the Sanders campaign has shied away from deep dives into policy, this interview might be why," says David Graham at The Atlantic: "The candidate reveals himself as a far defter diagnostician than clinician."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

You can read the transcript and make your own judgment, or peruse Jonathan Capehart's "nine moments in the Sanders conversation that left me agape" — or, on the other hand, Mike Konczal's detailed defense of Sanders' answers at the Roosevelt Institute ("If anything, Sanders is too wonky"), or the broader one by Peter Eavis at The New York Times.

Sanders rarely talks in specifics, and seems rarely pressed to do so. The questions the Daily News board asked him, as Sanders said many times, were "very fair" ones — with the exception of the subway gotcha, perhaps — but they are questions Sanders seldom faces. And if he does get the questions — in debates, for example — he doesn't answer them directly.

In the interview, he said he hadn't thought about some pretty big issues a president is in control of, like drone policy. He also couched a lot of his answers as his personal opinions. Why doesn't Sanders support the Palestinian Authority taking its Israel grievances before the International Criminal Court? "Look, why don't I support a million things in the world? I'm just telling you that I happen to believe."

Having an encyclopedic knowledge of foreign policy or the names of world leaders or the specific laws you would tell your attorney general to use to prosecute bank executives — these aren't prerequisites for being president. Sanders has a long list of big policy changes he wants to enact. "Think big," he told his supporters after winning Wisconsin. The details can be worked out after you win, or by the people you appoint to tackle each issue. But presidents are more than cheerleaders and visionaries. "Sanders isn't running for chief ideologue — he's running for chief executive," The Atlantic's Graham notes.

This is the central question mark of the Sanders campaign: How would he get anything passed through Congress? How would his revolution work, exactly? "How do you mobilize that many people, given voter apathy, voter cynicism, the sense, even though you're not, that all you guys are the same?" as Los Angeles Times editorial writer Scott Martelle asked Sanders when he sat down for an interview with that newspaper on March 23. Here's Sanders' answer:

"The whole thrust of my campaign is to ask, why not?" Sanders said later in the interview. It's a good question, and an attractive one. Why can't America rejigger the tax system to help the middle class and poor? Why can't the "wealthiest country in the history of the world" provide free college tuition and health care and paid family leave like other countries? Why is it fair or even good policy to let wealth continue to trickle upward to the super-rich? But he has trouble with the "how," not to mention the possible side effects of breaking up banks or destroying the private health insurance industry.

When pressed, Sanders explains that his "revolution" represents a huge upsurge in grassroots civic engagement, like the Civil Rights movement and gay rights movement. None of those movements were led by Washington, and certainly not by the president. A country's leader, almost by definition, cannot lead a revolution. Sanders knows that. "At the essence of everything that I'm saying, every answer that I'm giving to you, is that no president, not Bernie Sanders, can do these things alone," he told the LA Times editorial board.

Bernie Sanders isn't a fool. He would bring some interesting and unique attributes to the presidency — has another president ever lived in Israel before? Or been less beholden to a political party? He could be transformational. Or he could be just a president on a soap box, yelling.

When the LA Times editorial board asked Sanders how he planned to win, he told them, "You don't know me very well." Well, now he has our ear. Maybe it's time we get past the small-talk stage and see if we're a match.