Now that's splitting hairs.
I don't think so.
Obviously when you're going up against someone for an election it's going to be appropriate to make a case for why you would do a better job than the other person. I mean, I guess you can insist that this always be positive, with candidates only ever talking about good things about themselves, but even this involves a lot of implicit comparisons. And really this probably isn't even a good thing - we should want a candidate to directly address the case the other is making. How much relevant experience a candidate has is a perfectly reasonable thing for candidates to talk about.
My sense is that historically we've used "qualified" in a much more binary way than we've used words like "experienced". And my sense is that a person who is "unqualified" to be president is someone who basically should not be voted for. I expect Democrats to say that Republicans are not qualified to be president by virtue of their opposition to Roe v Wade, for example. The idea here is that really we don't need to look any further; this difference alone is decisive and nobody should be considering voting for a Republican or going through some kind of weighing process to try figure out if the Republican being better in some other way outweighs their position on abortion.
Now, maybe it's okay if you're just going to say that basically nobody is qualified to be president, although I think it's still reasonable to take this as a suggestion that it's permissible to just not vote for anyone. But what was really striking to me about Sanders' statement is that there is in fact a Republican who is much
more qualified than Clinton, by these standards. There is a Republican who has not accepted millions in donations from Wall Street and who claims to have thought the Iraq War was a mistake from the beginning and who is definitely against bad trade deals. It seems like kind of a big deal if the implication of your statement is that there are exactly two people in the race who are qualified to be president, and one is Donald Trump! I think it is completely reasonable for reporters to want to ask as a follow-up if Sanders is still committed to supporting the Democratic nominee. I certainly expect that he
is, but it's an important thing to be clear on given what he said and given the perception that some of his supporters may be inclined to sit out if he's not the nominee. I would guess that he comes out of this looking worse, to Democrats, and I think that's entirely appropriate.
(Not a fan of Sanders' comment, but in two months no one will care)