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[Wisconsin updates] Update (April 5, 1:15 p.m. PT): Sanders takes hits for interview

By Douglas Perry | The Oregonian/OregonLive
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on April 05, 2016 at 2:50 PM

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's campaign is putting the spotlight on an interview Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gave to the New York Daily News editorial board on Monday, saying it's proof that Sanders is not qualified to be president. Political observers are mostly in agreement that Sanders did not perform well. Bloomberg Politics managing editor and "Game Change .. http://www.amazon.com/Game-Change-Clintons-McCain-Lifetime/dp/0061733644 " co-author Mark Halperin called Sanders' answers on foreign policy "inadequate." As for domestic policy, the Washington Post reported .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/05/this-new-york-daily-news-interview-was-pretty-close-to-a-disaster-for-bernie-sanders/ : "Time and again, when pressed to get beyond his rhetoric on the evils of corporate America and Wall Street, Sanders struggled. Often mightily."

Sanders, for example, said it would be .. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306 .. up to JP Morgan Chase or Citibank "as to what they want to do and how they want to reconfigure themselves" after the Sanders administration has broken up the country's big banks. "That's not my decision."

Later, when asked whether the Obama administration was correct to move authority for drone attacks from the CIA to the U.S. military, he said, "I don't know the answer to that." He then insisted the U.S. should capture and "imprison" ISIS leaders rather than killing them with drones, but he couldn't say where such prisoners should be held. "Actually I haven't thought about it a whole lot," he said. "I suppose, somewhere near the locale where that person was captured. The best location where that individual would be safely secured in a way that we can get information out of him." (Sanders once voted against closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba but more recently has said the U.S. must shut it down .. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/politics/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-guantanamo-bay-gitmo/ .)

Perhaps most damaging of all for a presidential candidate seeking New Yorkers' votes, the Brooklyn native insisted he rides the subway whenever he's in the Big Apple but when asked how he does so, he said, "You get a token and you get in."

"Wrong," his interviewer told him. (The New York subway system stopped using tokens more than a dozen years ago.)

Read the entire transcript .. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306 .. of Sanders' interview with the Daily News' editorial board.

Despite the criticism of his interview performance, Sanders remains optimistic about his chances in the April 19 New York primary. When MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell asked him this morning if he thinks he can pull an upset in Clinton's home state, he insisted: "I think we can."

Update (April 5, 11:10 a.m. PT): A Wisconsin win would only be a start for Sanders

Bernie Sanders is on a roll. He crushed Hillary Clinton on March 26 in the Hawaii, Washington state and Alaska caucuses, gaining more than 70 percent of the support in each.

But this did not put Sanders in a much better position in the delegate hunt. Clinton, who cruised through most of the Southern states that came early on the primary calendar, has still won about two and a half million more votes than the Vermont senator and maintains a sizeable pledged-delegate lead.

Sanders needs to win close to 60 percent of all remaining pledged delegates to finish with a majority.

Wisconsin is important to Sanders -- a win would fuel the momentum narrative that is crucial to keeping his campaign in the spotlight. But even if he triumphs in the Badger State along the lines of the latest polls there, he and Clinton would essentially split the available delegates.

So, yes, Wisconsin is important. But it's a stepping stone to the states that are really important to Sanders' upset bid. The polling and data-analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com .. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-really-hard-to-get-bernie-sanders-988-more-delegates/ .. points out that "about 65 percent of the remaining delegates are in California, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland -- all states where Sanders trails Clinton in the polls and sometimes trails her by a lot. To reach a pledged delegate majority, Sanders will have to win most of the delegates from those big states."

Three examples of the mountain Sanders still has to climb: FiveThirtyEight's data crunchers estimate that to reach the pledged-delegate majority (that is, not even taking into account the super-delegates), Sanders would need to win New York by four percentage points, California by 15 percentage points and Oregon by 48 percentage points.

http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2016/04/wisconsin_primary_live_updates.html

.. expect future updates to push those two down the page ..