Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar slammed Julián Castro in a post-debate interview Thursday night, saying the former HUD secretary’s attack on Joe Biden’s memory was unnecessarily personal.

Mr. Castro had received a smattering of groans from the audience after he questioned whether the former vice president was struggling with his memory.

“Are you forgetting already what you said two minutes ago?” Mr. Castro asked Mr. Biden during the controversial exchange.

Ms. Klobuchar later told CNN what she thought in that moment.

“Ugh, I just thought, ‘This is not cool,’ ” she said. “Just because I think you can have policy differences, and I was one of the few ones up there that was willing to take on Bernie and some of these things even though we work together all the time, but I would never do it personally.

“I thought that was so personal and so unnecessary, when in fact we’ve got to unite,” she continued. “We’ve done this in 2018, that’s how we took back the House. We united behind candidates, and we didn’t treat each other like Donald Trump. And one of the things that’s really bothered me is how he has coarsened the rhetoric.

“I believe we don’t just have to change policies, we have to change the tone in our politics,” she added. “And when a statement like that is made, it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like something Donald Trump might tweet out.”

Mr. Castro, a former Housing and Urban Development secretary, said after the debate that he wasn’t taking a shot at Mr. Biden’s age, but his health care policy.

“It’s not an attack on Vice President Biden,” he told ABC. “It’s not something about personality. It’s about the health care policy. That was my focus.”

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