Uh, oh. Here we go again.

Another pol — both political parties have them that’s why they are called politicians because they don’t want to lose votes so they attack or defend, or backtrack if they step in it to try to get closer to their real goal which is winning power — finds he has set off a mini-firestorm that could hurt him among some potential voters. So he blames it on….(get ready now, don’t be shocked, did you brace yourself?) the press. And he partly backtracks but repeats his wrong justification.

It’s a quintessential case of a politician who was poorly served by his strategists, went a bit too far and then blames it on the bad, old mainstream media which is always blamed by conservatives, liberals, Democrats, libertarians and Republicans if they hate a report that puts them in a bad light. Last night Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in a speech stunned some in the political pundit world by seemingly taking the increasingly bitter Democratic Presidential nomination race to another level when he said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unqualified to be President If you haven’t seen the clip, you will on GOP ads if Clinton wins the nomination.

But today, after being pressed by journalists and talkers, and facing a you-know-what storm of criticism on social media (except from his supporters) he did a classic backtrack. But not total.

His problems were compounded by the fact that he and his staff (including according to some cable news reports in a fundraising email to supporters) claimed Clinton had called him unqualified on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. But Morning Joe says Clinton said no such thing — and they’re not big Hillary fans:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found a defender Thursday in “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough, who said Clinton never explicitly said her Democratic presidential rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was “unqualified” to be President.

Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, said Clinton dodged his direct question about whether she thought Sanders was qualified for the nation’s highest office.

“I tried to get Hillary Clinton four times – three or four times – to say that Bernie Sanders was unqualified to be President of the United States,” he said. “I keep going until I get an answer or give up and after three or four attempts with Secretary Clinton, I gave up because she was not going to say the words ‘He is unqualified to be President of the United States.’”

Scarborough then asked MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle if his take away from the interview was Clinton arguing that Sanders isn’t qualified.

“No, she clearly did not say Bernie Sanders was not qualified to be President,” Barnicle agreed. “This is going to be a 12-day tension convention here in New York state between Sen. Sanders and Secretary Clinton.”

Co-host Mika Brzezinski pointed out Clinton said Sanders hadn’t “done his homework” about how to restructure the big banks.

“But she never said he was not qualified,” Scarborough responded.

So did Sanders and his staff mishear what she said?

Or was this simply irresistable low hanging political fruit — the way politicians of both parties will leap at something and exaggerate it to go on the attack?

Today Sanders blamed it on the media that both parties hate when they see stories that hurt them, and quote when they stories that make them look good. He didn’t mishear, he was led astray by a HEADLINE:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blamed the media at a press conference on Thursday morning for instigating and perpetuating the disagreement between himself and rival Hillary Clinton about their respective qualifications for the highest political office in America.

“So when, you have headlines in the Washington Post, ‘Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president,’ my response is well, you know, if you want to question my qualifications, let me suggest this,” Sanders said. “That maybe the American people might wonder about your qualifications, Madam Secretary, when you voted for the war in Iraq, the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in the modern history of America.”

So this means:

MORE:

The Washington Post article he referenced pulled together numerous interviews in which Clinton said Sanders was ill-prepared for an interview with the New York Daily News and questioned his commitment to the Democratic Party. In those interviews, Clinton didn’t explicitly say Sanders was unqualified for the presidency.

The Daily News story was indeed a disaster and was widely panned by the press and political analysts, some of them Sanders supporters or sympathizers. Again, the interview showed a lack of preparation for the interview on his part and/or a shocking lack of staffwork to prepare him to sit down with a newspaper editorial board where he was most assuredly going to be asked for specificity.

“This is not the type of politics that I want to get in, I know it’s what the media loves,” Sanders said in reference to Clinton and Sanders trading barbs.

“It is not the type of politics that I want to get in, but let me also be very clear. If Secretary Clinton thinks that I just come from the small state of Vermont, we are not used to this, we will get used to it fast.”

Sanders vowed that his campaign would not “get beaten up and lied about.” He later pivoted to saying voters should question Clinton’s qualifications after she raised “millions of dollars from Wall Street.”

Anyone who has been a reporter knows the “pivot” is usually to get off a subject and move onto a new one ASAP for reasons of a)pitching another subject b)getting off one that hurts a candidate by trying to literally move on.

And then there’s this final quote:

“What I just said is that she has attacked me for being unqualified. And if I am going to attack for being ‘unqualified’ I will respond in kind,” he said, adding he hopes to move away from personal attacks.

Except she never attacked him for being unqualified as President.

She did what most politicians do: she hedged and avoiding answering to avoid boosting his candidacy by saying he was qualified or setting off a firestorm by saying he wasn’t.

I suspect this will hurt Sanders for several reasons. His supporters will love it since in both political parties mean and lash out is in style. Nuance is oh, so 20th century. But he has now created a new narrative and story that will put him on the defensive.

if Sanders indeed wants to go to super-delegates and get them to switch to him he automatically has his work cut out for him since he has not been a Democrat and has not raised money for the Democratic Party. Few super-delegates will agree that Hillary Clinton is unqualified to be President. That’s his target audience. Plus, his comments now are totally at odds with the way he originally said he’d conduct his campaign and his comments in debates about the fact that any Democrat would be more qualified to be President than any of the Republicans who seek the Oval Office seat.

But, mostly, Sanders has stepped on his own Big Mo: winning Wisconsin. The Daily News interview stepped on the news to a certain extent. This compounds the imagery.

The Washington Post has looked at this controversy in detail, offering what the Post actually reported and what was on Morning Joe and has here’s it’s conclusion:

The Pinocchio Test

Sanders is putting words in Clinton’s mouth. She never said “quote unquote” that he was not qualified to be president. In fact, she diplomatically went out of her way to avoid saying that, without at the same time saying he was qualified. The Washington Post article appropriately noted she raised questions about his qualifications, but certainly never said or suggested she said Sanders was unqualified.

Sanders would have been on safer ground if he had said Clinton is raising questions about his qualifications and now he would like to raise questions about her qualifications. But he can’t slam her for words she did not say.

Three Pinocchios

ABC’s Rick Klein:

This year’s Democratic primary race was a slow-developing affair, a friendly contest between three, and then two, candidates with enough mutual respect to not even register on the campaign Richter scale that’s been recalibrated by the Republican candidates just about every week. That has now changed, formally and officially, and all it took was one day of campaigning in the run-up to New York. “I don’t believe that she is qualified” to be president, Bernie Sanders declared, ostensibly responding to a similar charge leveled by Hillary Clinton at Sanders. Clinton has said no such thing, and how careful she’s been in not saying it suggests that she has strongly not wanted to go there. But now that Sanders has gone there, with his campaign enumerating ways he believes her not to be qualified, there’s no going back. These kinds of assertions are extremely difficult to recant or recast. As a message to the Sanders voters who would be hard enough for Clinton to attract anyway, it’s a signal to stay strong for Sanders – and maybe to stay out of the process if Clinton is instead the nominee.

NBC’s First Read:

Wow. So long for the days when Clinton and Sanders were shaking hands on the debate stage, huh?

But there are two important points to make in this dispute. One, Clinton never uttered the words “unqualified,” as Sanders charged last night (even though she and her campaign have been much more aggressive toward Sanders after losing Wisconsin). In fact, she dodged the question.
…
And two, some of the things that he said makes Clinton unqualified to be president — having a Super PAC, raising money from Wall Street, supporting trade agreements — would also disqualify President Obama. There is no doubt that Sanders and his campaign have been facing extra scrutiny and heat, even after their big win in Wisconsin. But saying in response that Clinton is unqualified (for the same things that about 95% of Democratic politicians do) seems akin to a George Costanza moment when you realize that the insult you intended doesn’t go over that well.

AND:

Given the escalation in the Democratic race, Sanders and his campaign have a question to ask themselves: What is their campaign about — the ideas they want to push, or capturing the Democratic nomination? Because right now, they’re not winning on either front. Sanders is significantly behind in the delegate race, and the ideas he might want to discuss are now getting buried in this war of words. As our colleague John Harwood puts it, “[It] seems as if Team Sanders has gotten itself stuck in no-man’s land between message campaign and genuine threat for nomination.” Both campaigns are clearly frustrated right now — Team Clinton got blown out in Wisconsin; Team Sanders, even after their win, realizes the math isn’t in its favor. And it’s showing.

The controversy continues on Twitter:

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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