If he was gonna go with the TARP excuse (again, not that it was ever a good excuse), then he should have gone with something like "I wish I could have supported the auto bailout. Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of Senate procedure, that would have forced me to support something else that I wanted to oppose, and ultimately I felt more strongly about that. I was too strongly opposed to rescuing the broader economy to be able to support rescuing the segment of the economy that's particularly important in this state." THAT would have been honest.

By the way, remember how this all worked out. Republicans were broadly OPPOSED to the auto bailout, and they shamed some Democrats into taking their side. There's a *reason* it was ultimately bundled with TARP, because TARP was essentially certain to pass. (It was politically fraught at the time, but both parties understood the economics of it, and very carefully whipped the votes for it.) The auto bailout failed on its own, and it eventually passed *because* it was bundled with TARP, which, love it or hate it, would have passed anyway. This kind of compromising and political maneuvering is one of the central things that Bernie is running against, but nobody can dispute the fact that if not for this maneuver, *there would have never been an auto bailout*! If President Sanders would have signed the auto-only bill, it wouldn't have mattered because it never would have reached his desk anyway. The bill that would have reached his desk is the auto+tarp bill, and if he vetoed that then there wouldn't have been an auto bailout.

It's not good enough for him to say he supported it if he stopped supporting it as soon as he had to start weighing multiple priorities.

His best excuse is that he let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That's nothing to be proud of. But it's a theme both with Bernie and his supporters.