There’s a lot of Sturm und Drang on the rec list today about who invited Bernie Sanders to be visiting the Holy See to speak at a conference and meet with the pope.
Was it the Pope? Was it a vatican official? Was it Bernie? Whodunnit?
It’s all very entertaining to watch the “gotchas” fly back and forth as people desperately try to prove they are right on the invite fiasco, we’re missing the larger point:
At the moment, Bernie isn’t listed as a speaker in the conference materials. He is listed as an “Other Participant.”
In fact, if you read through the agenda, the whole thing is literally an academic conference. Papers are literally being presented to humanities professors. Then other humanities professors are responding.
Yes, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa will be speaking. Two luminaries of the radical left in South America. But everyone else on the list is a humanities professor.
And the Pontiff himself is not even listed as an attendee or participant.
I think the Sanders campaign has miscalculated badly here and is way out over their skis.
They cast this thing, beginning this morning, as some kind of invitation from the Pope to go to the Vatican and meet with him to discuss vital issues.
That would have been a great photo-op. That’s presidential. That’s why the media went nuts over this. The media would cover the hell out of that, probably live!
But actually, he is attending a humanities conference — complete with the presentation of academic papers — in Europe, to listen to professors talk about poverty; not meeting with the Pope at all. Not even speaking to the conference. His Bio isn’t even listed in the conference materials!
The media ain’t gonna cover Bernie sitting around getting lectured by Evo Morales or watching some social science professor talk about his paper on environmental economics.
And he is doing all of this the weekend before a critical primary?
This is an epic unforced error by Bernie’s campaign. I don’t yet know whether it was a tactical error or a strategic one, but now he can’t quietly back out of this thing because of the media heat the “invitation controversy” has gotten.