Bernie Sanders visits the New York Daily News (this photo is the property of the New York Daily News)

A few months ago I finally realized that Bernie Sanders was never going to go beyond what originally drew me to his candidacy last year.

Bernie Sanders was terrific on identifying and articulating the problems with the state of our nation. But I already knew what those problems were.

Bernie Sanders was terrific on identifying and articulating what our goals as a nation should be. But I already shared those goals.

Senator Sanders started to remind me of a doctor who was great at diagnosis, but couldn’t pick up a prescription pad or a scalpel to follow through on actual, viable treatment. So I began to look elsewhere for a viable candidate to support.

What the editorial board of The New York Daily News encountered from Bernie Sanders today expresses in a nutshell my frustration with a campaign that seems to have been running on catch phrases such as “oligarchy” and “revolution” and on mantras such as “millions and millions of people”.

From the introduction by Daily News Bin to the New York Daily News’ transcript of their editorial board’s meeting with Senator Sanders * April 4, 2016:

“The thing about protest candidates is that they tend to be long on rhetoric and short on detail. Not until they begin sitting down with editorial boards do we get to learn whether their defiant plans for the nation consist of anything workable, or indeed, whether these candidates even know what they’re talking about. Now that Bernie Sanders has spent the better part of a year promising he’d break up the big banks, he just admitted to the New York Daily News that he has no idea how he’d do it or whether the President even has the power to do so – and that he hasn’t bothered to look it up.”

In a bizarre exchange between the New York Daily News and Bernie Sanders released today, the newspaper put forth a simple question regarding breaking up the largest banks in the United States: “How do you go about doing it?” His answer involved Dodd-Frank and the Secretary of the Treasury and made little sense, so the editorial board asked him if he thinks the Fed currently has the authority. His answer: “Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.”

In other words, despite so many months of promising to break up the big banks, Sanders doesn’t appear to have ever stopped and asked an economic adviser how it would legally or functionally work or if it’s even possible. Nor does he appear to understand how the Fed works. The New York Daily News asked him a followup question of whether he believed the banks could be broken up by “Federal Reserve fiat.” His response: “Yeah. Well, I believe you do.” Then he pivoted back toward his usual economic reform stump speech as a way of avoiding the question. Then things got worse.

Finally, after more back and forth, Bernie Sanders dropped a bombshell as to how he would break up the big banks: “It’s something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.”