Bernie's In

After The Daily News Saturday front page showed Brooklyn-born Sanders in front of the paper's iconic “Who’s a Bum!” image that chronicled the Dodgers 1955 World Series victory, the Clinton and Sanders camps erupted into skirmishing over who would debate the other and when. If ever.

Let’s us all now join for the good of New Yorkers. The Daily News will host a conversation between Clinton and Sanders if both can see their way to participating in a simple, fairly moderated discussion. No hype. No show biz. No gotchas. No dumbed down tit-for-tat provocations. Just question, answer, probe, question, answer, probe.

Then, too, the News Editorial Board hopes to engage with Clinton individually, as we did with Sanders. Nydailynews.com will post a transcript of that Sanders conversation on Monday.

New York’s former senator and others assert that Sanders’ most sweeping plans, including universal health care and free college tuition, are either politically undoable or financially on Mars.

Time and again, he has asserted both that his numbers will add up and that he would lead an unstoppable political revolution in which all things Sanders became possible.

Since the much mulled points are unverifiable in the extreme, we focused the discussion instead on the practicalities of some of Sanders’ central vows. In some areas, his answers lacked a surprising degree of specificity.

He trumpets, for example, that in the first 100 days of a Sanders administration, the Treasury Department would identify banks and other financial institutions that are deemed too big to fail — and that he would break them up within the first year of his term.

In a speech in January, Sanders said that Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank law gave the government the power to act against an institution that was “a grave threat to the economy.”

In fact, the law empowers the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to take such action.

Asked about the mechanism for the extraordinarily complex undertaking of breaking up a huge bank, Sanders spoke both about passing legislation and about relying on the Federal Reserve.

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.”

Daily News: “How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, ‘Now you must do X, Y and Z?’”

Sanders: “Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, the determination.”

On a related topic, Sanders has often railed that, although banks have paid huge fines and settlements stemming from the financial meltdown, no major executive was criminally punished.

While declining to say that President Obama’s Justice Department had tanked on prosecutions, Sanders told us he would appoint “a much more aggressive attorney general.”

Asked whether prosecutors might have brought indictments under any existing U.S. statutes, Sanders said that he believed so but added:

“Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don’t.”

Finally, because Sanders has accused Clinton of displaying a lack of zeal toward cracking down on Wall Street, while also pointing out that she had gotten speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, the Daily News asked:

“Were she to be elected, do you think that the American people could have the expectation or the trust that she would be aggressive enough against the banks and financial institutions?”

Sanders answered that Americans “will probably have the expectation she will probably not be aggressive enough.”

Over to you, Secretary Clinton. Your turn to speak

Not only did I read it, I posted a link to the transcript. He was totally unprepared, face it. When asked how he was going to actually bring about all these fine ideals he has, he kept saying, there will be a political revolution which will (magically) bring it about. As though we haven't been through this with Obama already. But hey, Bernie will be more aggressive I suppose and maybe McConnell will suddenly become a socialist since they won't be a black man in the White House.

it took me a little while to realise (after being called 'partisan') that this is largely a forum for shrill Clinton supporters to attack the credibility and intelligence of Sanders supporters (and interested outsiders).

No I was not, I was and still mostly supportive of Barrack Obama in 2008 and 2012. In fact, Bernie making slights against the performance of Obama is one of things I most disapprove of.

I want all to know I do not down thumb anybody, except in the rarest occasions. Haven't a clue who it is, but both sides are doing it

The inability for someone who is antisocial and confronted with inconvenient truth and not laugh is something new to my studies of cluster b disorders