Bernie Sanders on Friday called former president Bill Clinton's past sexual misconduct "totally disgraceful and unacceptable" but added that he would not use that as leverage in the 2016 race because he is running a campaign against Hillary Clinton, not her husband.
Appearing at a town hall in Toledo, Iowa, Sanders responded to an audience member who said that Hillary isn't qualified to be president because of her support for her husband. "My question to you is, isn't one of the qualifications to be president to have some kind of moral authority?” the attendee asked Sanders, according to The Hill. “I mean, how can you tell a Secret Service agent that he has to be fired for having an affair with a prostitute in a hotel room, but support a president who has an affair -- a known affair -- in the White House. It seems to me she isn't qualified."
"Look, Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton," said Sanders, Politico reported. "What Bill Clinton did, I think we can all acknowledge, was totally, totally, totally disgraceful and unacceptable. But I am running against Hillary Clinton. I'm not running against Bill Clinton."
Sanders noted that focusing on Bill Clinton is addressing the wrong issue and that he isn't interested in running a negative campaign.
"And I believe and I gotta say this, and I thank you for your question, in this sense, I think what we need to do as a nation, certainly something the Republicans are not doing, is focus on the bloody issues facing this country -- the disappearance of the middle class income and wealth inequality," He said, according to CNN.
Bill Clinton's previous indiscretions have resurfaced in the 2016 race after Republican front-runner Donald Trump made recent efforts to highlight scandals of the 1990s. "There was certainly a lot of abuse of women,'' Trump said last month, Politico reported. "You look at whether it's Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones or many of them. That certainly will be fair game. Certainly if they play the woman's card with respect to me, that will be fair game."
