Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said Tuesday that he agreed that leading rival Donald Trump should attack former President Bill Clinton because "all previous presidents and their administrations are fair game for analysis and comparison."
"President Clinton is a previous president," the retired pediatric neurosurgeon told
Neil Cavuto on Fox Business. "Just because one of the candidates who's running happens to be married to one of them doesn't take that individual off the table."
Trump, who has had a long relationship with the Clintons, has been
slamming the former president since current Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said last week that he was joining her campaign.
The developer has said that Bill Clinton's sex scandals with former intern Monica Lewinsky and others were "fair game" now that he was becoming part of his wife's campaign.
Cavuto quoted Carson's comments from 1998, when the Lewinsky scandal became public. He said then that the debacle caused a "loss of respect for our politicians" and even "led to the loss of innocence in our children."
Carson responded by explaining that "we should all be sorry" because the scandal involved a sitting president.
"The fact of the matter is there is such a thing as right and wrong. There are morals and values and principles."
"We have to stop letting people sweep this under the rug and say, 'It's no problem, everything is of equal value,'" Carson continued. "That's not true. That's not what made America into the greatest nation the world has ever known."
"We should not be willing to throw away all our values and principles for the sake of political correctness. Absolutely not," he said. "We'll never submit to that."
Carson added that he would be "altering some things" to improve his flagging campaign in light of a recent drop in the polls and will be "talking about that quite publicly next week."
Amid reports that campaign advisers have encouraged Carson to be more negative, he told Cavuto: "I'm not going to ever be a nasty person. That's just not who I am."
"But I will point out differences, and I will make it possible for people to see that clearly it's the philosophy and it's the life and it's the accomplishments," he added. "One of the things that I want people to understand is that you don't judge strength by the volume of proclamation."
"You judge strength by what has been accomplished in a person's life."
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