AP Photo Bernie Sanders is sorry but his campaign isn't

MANCHESTER, N.H. — “Yes, I apologize.”

Bernie Sanders opened the debate on Saturday night with a clean, swift apology directed at Hillary Clinton, standing next to him, for the actions of his staffers who reviewed, searched and saved data from her campaign’s voter file made accessible briefly Wednesday because of a data breach.


“I want to apologize to our supporters,” Sanders continued, “this is not the type of campaign that we run.”

His repentant tone and acceptance of responsibility for the actions of his staffers marked an about-face from the combative line of attack his top campaign operatives were telegraphing in the hours leading up to the debate. And it was the latest indication of the growing gulf between the decorous candidate and his more antagonistic staffers.

"Apologize for what?” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told POLITICO Saturday afternoon, when asked whether the Clinton campaign deserved an apology for the data breach.

“Did Hillary Clinton apologize when one of her leadership team in Virginia made offensive comments about Muslims? No! She kicked him off the committee."

While Sanders appeared quick to take the blame and move on to bigger issues in the debate, his top campaign officials seemed to be spoiling for a fight in the run-up to the debate.

“What my guys did was wrong,” Weaver said. “But the worst thing that was done was that you had the chairwoman of the DNC trying to paralyze and destroy one of the campaigns. It was absolutely worse.”

He was referring to the DNC’s 48-hour shutdown of Sanders’ access to its voter file during critical canvassing hours leading up to the debate. Weaver wasn’t alone. Minutes before the debate began, Sanders’ senior strategist Tad Devine poured gasoline on the fire, writing on Twitter: “when I said a fired staffer made a ‘mistake,’ I meant it in the same way Hillary Clinton did about the Iraq war.”

Even DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz remarked on the apparent disconnect between Sanders and his operatives. “I have the utmost respect for Sen. Sanders,” she told the Burlington Free Press ahead of the debate. “I don’t think that this had anything to do with him. I think his campaign team has not served him well here.”

It’s not the first time Sanders has appeared to resist the political tactics his campaign aides are pushing for. For months, his aides have urged him to draw stronger contrasts with Clinton on policy issues and to go negative — a heavy lift for a politician who prides himself on being a different kind of politician and running positive campaigns.

“I pushed [Sanders] hard to do what he did to let them know, if they are going to start going down that road, we are not going to take it,” Devine told Bloomberg News last October after Sanders tried out some attacks at the high-stakes Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa. “And it is going to be about a lot of issues where she's gone from one place to another.”

At times, Sanders has taken the bait.

“I disagree with Hillary Clinton on virtually everything,” he said in an interview last month with the editorial board of the Boston Globe.

But then he quickly shied away from wearing a suit that doesn’t appear to fit him. “Virtually is the key word,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow at a forum in South Carolina, when pressed on his comments. Then Sanders wailed at the pressure to go negative on the Democratic front-runner.

“I can’t walk down a hallway in the nation’s capital without people begging me to beat up on Hillary Clinton, attack Hillary Clinton, tell me why she’s the worst person in the world,” he bemoaned. “I resisted, I resisted, and I resisted. I think unlike our Republican friends there, who think that politics is about attacking each other in incredibly stupid and destructive ways, I think what we are trying to do is have a sensible debate on the important issues facing America.”

The Vermont senator's resistance to rolling around in the political mud was perhaps most on display in the first Democratic debate, when Sanders threw Clinton a lifeline by declaring: "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!" His aides said the line was all Bernie, and improvised on the spot.

There have been missteps along the way. After Sanders pledged to run a campaign without negative advertising, his campaign ran an Internet ad that attacked Clinton as being funded by “big money interests.” A click on the button showed a list of Clinton donors like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. The campaign quickly pulled the ad, which ran on POLITICO, after it was noticed by New Hampshire voters.

Sanders has also bristled at complying with the trappings of a prime-time presidential campaign. “He didn't like when I showed up with a bigger [film] crew than he'd seen in his life before,” Devine told POLITICO last month, recalling his efforts to turn the self-described Democratic socialist from Vermont into a prime-time candidate with a polished promo video. “He doesn’t like being filmed. He doesn’t like makeup. He doesn't want to have the gaffer lighting, the grip, the teleprompter operator, the best boy — he doesn't understand why we need all these people standing around doing all this stuff. He thinks it's not necessary.”