“Look, Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton," Sanders said. Sanders: Bill Clinton's behavior 'totally disgraceful and unacceptable'

Bernie Sanders on Friday decried former President Bill Clinton’s affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky as “totally disgraceful and unacceptable” but stressed that he is running a campaign against Hillary Clinton, not her husband.

“Look, Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton. What Bill Clinton did, I think we can all acknowledge, was totally, totally, totally disgraceful and unacceptable,” the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate told a crowd at an Iowa town hall. “But I am running against Hillary Clinton. I’m not running against Bill Clinton.”


In a jab at the right, Sanders said the nation needs to do what the Republicans are not — focus on serious issues like the disappearing middle class and wealth inequality.

“So what I am doing is contrasting my record with Hillary Clinton’s record, and they are very, very different records,” Sanders said. “But I am not gonna get into the personal stuff. You’re looking at somebody who in a long political career — and you call up your friends in Vermont to verify this — I’ve never run a negative TV ad in my life.”

Sanders’ campaign last month pulled an online ad criticizing Hillary Clinton because the candidate said it fell into a “gray area” of negativity. “There are sometimes there are gray areas,” Sanders told ABC News at the time. “We felt that it was a gray area. We took the ad down. We are running a positive campaign.”

On Friday, Sanders was responding to a question from an audience member about the former president. Bill Clinton has increasingly become a focal point in his wife’s campaign since he and their daughter, Chelsea Clinton, began stumping for her this month.

Republican poll leader Donald Trump, meanwhile, has said Bill Clinton’s past transgressions are “fair game.” Earlier this week, the billionaire businessman released a video tying the Democratic front-runner to Anthony Weiner and Bill Cosby. Weiner, who’s married to Hillary Clinton's longtime aide Huma Abedin, resigned from Congress after tweeting a picture of his genitals. Cosby, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton in the past, was recently charged with aggravated sexual assault in Pennsylvania.

