Sanders, an Independent senator from Vermont, was beating Clinton, the former secretary of state, 56 percent to 44 percent with 84 percent of the vote counted.
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Weaver defended Sanders for calling Clinton “unqualified” to be president on Wednesday, arguing that the unqualified line of attack originated in the Clinton campaign.
“It was my first term when we changed from tokens to the MetroCard”, said Clinton, who represented NY in the U.S. Senate from 2001 until her appointment as Secretary of State in 2009. I’m not going to get beaten up; I’m not going to get lied about. Instead he said he is going to “fight back” when he believes Clinton is attacking him, an defense he hatched on Thursday.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (VT-I), Democratic Presidential Candidate: Are you qualified to be president of the United States when you’re raising millions of dollars from Wall Street, an entity who’s greed, recklessness and illegal behavior helped destroy our economy?
Supporters of Bernie Sanders took over the hashtag to point out all the ways in which Clinton is not qualified for the presidency.
“She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am quote unquote, not qualified to be president”, he said.
“This was an attack that was launched on their side”, Weaver said, pointing to reports that the Clinton campaign was embarking on a strategy to “disqualify” Sanders, even though Clinton has never explicitly said that Sanders is “unqualified” to be president.
That whole bit about Hillary Clinton being unqualified to be president? Sanders has faced criticism for saying he thought tokens were still in use in an interview with the New York Daily News editorial board last week. Sanders received 47; Clinton 41. Though Clinton is a familiar face around NY state, she is not a frequent subway rider.
And in a halfhearted endorsement of Sanders’ qualifications to be president, Clinton added that he was better than the Republicans who are running. Other examples include #WhichHillary, commenting on her history of shifting policy views, and #ToneDownForWhat, which emerged after Clinton criticised Sanders’s for his tone.
“Thank you for being so good to me and for being so good to Hillary when she was a senator here”, he said.
“I think he hadn’t done his homework and he’d been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hasn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions”, she told MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Clinton’s allies and the White House rose to her defence on Thursday.
Clinton sought to shift attention back to her Republican opponents, telling reporters Thursday: “I will take Bernie Sanders over Donald Trump or Ted Cruz any time, so let’s keep our eye over what’s at stake in this election”. But if it’s not time for Sanders to pull out, it’s also not time for him to scorch the earth in a way that damages Clinton’s prospects in November should she win the nomination.
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“This is a new low”, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said on Twitter.
