Because it would be bad to put someone without a lot of experience into a position of great power, wouldn’t it?

Notice how Obama catches himself before he actually says Thomas doesn’t have enough experience to sit on the SCOTUS.  That sort of makes this gaffe worse than if he’d just come right out and finished that thought, doesn’t it?

If he’d finished saying what he was saying we’d all laugh at how clueless the comment is coming from a not-even-one-full-term Senator who is running for the highest elected office in America.  But he caught himself, which shows us that he knows how thin his resume is and isn’t interested in bringing the subject up.