ROBERT SABO/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Hillary Clinton met with the Daily News Editorial Board eight days after its sit-down with Bernie Sanders.

Let me set some ground rules here and address some conspiracy theories before I get started.

1. I love the New York Daily News. I'm not leaving. Writers at papers disagree peacefully every single day.

2. I love our Editorial Board. They are a smart, seasoned group of journalists.

3. I have been given the freedom, from the day I joined this staff, to write whatever the hell I wanna write without censorship.

If you can get past those things, let's dig in.

I'm disappointed.

I disagree with virtually every single word written by our Editorial Board on why they are supporting Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. It is amazing, shocking even, on how differently we see this race and the candidates in it.

TRANSCRIPT: CLINTON MEETS WITH NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD

I'm not on the Editorial Board of the Daily News. They don't consult me. When I got on Twitter Tuesday evening and saw that they had just endorsed Clinton over Bernie Sanders, I learned alongside everybody else who saw the tweet. When I clicked the link and read the endorsement, it was my first time seeing their rationale.

I have deliberately avoided reading any other critiques or rebuttals so I could thoughtfully pen my own response without outside influence.

First off, without impugning the character of my colleagues, I think age is a real factor here. In fact, I think the single biggest difference in how most people view Sanders isn't race, or sex or ethnicity — or even political history — but age.

People under 40 like Sanders a whole lot.

People under 30 absolutely love him.

Democratic voters under 25 hardly recognize another candidate even exists.

Our Editorial Board, like 99% of editorial boards across America, skews older. I'm not being an ageist here — the facts are that younger voters see this race, see the candidates, and see America drastically different than their parents and grandparents. This is not to discount the endorsement of Clinton on the merit of it being written by "old people," but it is essential that we recognize just how likely it would be, demographically speaking, for an older board of professionals to pen an endorsement of Clinton over Sanders.

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I am told, and I believe it, that a few members of the Editorial Board gave Sanders serious consideration before they made this decision.

That said, I believe our Editorial Board offered what amounts to a thoughtful, if perhaps perplexing, endorsement of Clinton with a scathing, sometimes backhanded critique of Sanders.

Sanders could've written the first 12 paragraphs of The News endorsement himself.

I'm still miffed.

No candidate is more dedicated to helping working-class families grow stronger than Sanders. Heck, the Working Families Party, a powerhouse in New York,endorsed Sanders for this very reason. They said:

“We want to live in a nation that allows all people to live a decent life, no matter what is in their parents' bank account or who is in their family tree. But the super-rich have used their economic muscle to buy political muscle, and unless you're one of them, what you think government should do basically doesn't count. That's why we're standing with Bernie Sanders to build the political revolution and make our nation into one where every family can thrive."

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While The Justice Department recently announced a $5 billion settlement by Goldman Sachs for their fraudulent practices, Hillary Clinton was paid $675,000 to give three speeches for them and refuses to release the transcripts from those events. From Goldman Sachs alone she earned twice as much as Bernie's entire net worth.

Still, that's chump change for Clinton. In just 12 speeches delivered to big banks and Wall Street investment firms, Clinton made $2,935,000 from 2013-2015. That's more than the average American makes in their lifetime. An average college graduate is expected to earn $2.4 million in the United States. An average high school graduate just $770,000.

The very executives that have paid Clinton over and over and over again to come speak to them — guess what has happened to their income since 1999? It doubled while everyone else's tanked.

The Clintons have actually earned an astounding $153 million in speaking fees since leaving office. Do your own math on how much their income has increased since 1999. Asked about the millions Clinton has made from corporations, Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, told Time Magazine.

“It's big money. They're spending it because they have far greater sums riding on those decisions that they're trying to shape. Corporations or associations must justifiably make these investments because everyone knew for many years that Clinton would always remain a power broker. Every man or woman on the street thought Hillary Clinton would run again."

Are we to ignore all of this? How? Why? Are we expected to somehow believe that these corporations and banks and insurance companies spent tens of millions of dollars because they love the quality of her oratory? Did Goldman Sachs literally have her speak again and again and yet again because she was hitting home runs each and every time or because they wanted to curry favor with who they believed would be the next president?

When Elizabeth Warren, speaking to Bill Moyers, told the painful tale of two Clintons — one, an unbought and unbossed First Lady and another, influenced by Wall Street lobbyists in the Senate — are we expected that she’s now back to her 1996 self?

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Because, if so, it was also in 1996 when a 49-year-old Hillary Clinton infamously spoke of young black children as super-predators while serving as the First Lady. And it was just last week when her husband defended the term, defended his crime bill and defended welfare reform.

Our Editorial Board said, “Clinton is unsparingly clear-eyed about what’s wrong with America while holding firm to what's right with America.”

I've come to the exact opposite conclusion about her judgment on what's right and what's wrong for America.

The Iraq War, which not only cost thousands of lives, but cost our nation over one trillion dollars. To give that some context, Sanders' plan to provide college for all costs $75 billion per year. For the cost of the disastrous and foolhardy Iraq War, which Sanders opposed and Hillary supported, every American could attend college for the next 13 years.

For the cost of the Iraq War, every American could have 12 weeks of paid Family and Medical Leave for the next 30 years.

That's amazing!

Bad judgment is expensive. Any day of the week I would trade K-16 education and paid Family and Medical Leave for the Iraq War, wouldn't you?

We have the will to make these judgment calls, but politicians say Sanders (and by default all of us who support him) has amazing ideas with absolutely no idea how he's going to make them work.

This isn't just disrespectful, it's ridiculous. Our Editorial Board states that when Sanders was interviewed by them and “subjected to meaningful scrutiny for the first time, the senator from Vermont proved utterly unprepared for the Oval Office.”

Where I'm from in Kentucky we call that “hogwash.”

Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, who has known Clinton since she was a college student, but chose to endorse Sanders, agrees. Speaking about his now infamous interview with our Editorial Board, Reich, a beloved economist,said:

“Bernie was absolutely correct when he said the President has the authority to break up the big banks under Dodd-Frank. He's repeatedly specified exactly how he'd use that Dodd-Frank authority to do so. His critics are confusing the Dodd-Frank Act with the Federal Reserve. Whether the Fed has the authority on its own to break up the biggest banks is irrelevant. Clearly, Sanders has the Democratic establishment worried enough to try to twist his words into pretzels.”

This, after all, was where both the Clinton campaign, and now the Daily News Editorial Board, most often claimed Sanders dropped the ball.

Except, he didn't.

The notion that a man who has actively and passionately served for over three decades in public office was somehow stumped by some softballs thrown by our Editorial Board defies all logic.

Sanders speaks in shorthand, particularly in many interviews, but he was actually thorough in his responses to most questions posed to him by the board.

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When I first read the transcript, I actually loved what I saw. When I read it again, I still loved it. Same thing when I read it the third time.

Even still, if Sanders' interview with the Editorial Board was akin to his standardized test score for a college application, choosing to value a small section of his interview over his entire body of work, his life story, his recommendations, just doesn't make sense to me. If Tom Hanks flubs an interview about a movie role, in what world would that outshine his entire body of work? If Steph Curry was a free agent, and didn't perfectly nail an interview for a team, at what point is that team making a huge mistake to value the interview over what they've actually seen on the court throughout his career? We know Tom Hanks. We know Steph Curry. We know Sanders — he's as consistent as it gets.

Of course, when you ask a presidential candidate, in an interview scheduled to last just 45 minutes, to explain how banks that are declared "too big to fail" will be broken up, he's not going to actually give a multi-hour breakdown of the blueprints, but a sense of his guiding principles on the matter, before pivoting to the next question. Not only that, but Bernie showed maturity, not ignorance, when admitting who he would confer with and what he felt he needed to study more before offering concrete thoughts on some questions.

In the end, I agree with one key point from our Editorial Board. They say, in their conclusion, that "Clinton's proposals are shaped for the world in which we live, not the world in which we might wish to live."

I agree. Voters in the 15 states Sanders has won, including seven states in a row, also agree.

Sanders is not a status quo candidate. He’s not proposing to moderately shift our nation an inch to the left here, or an inch to the right there as Clinton is doing.