A video of Hillary Clinton swaying and collapsing before aides carried her into a car Sunday has turned concerns about her health from a conspiracy theory to a legitimate campaign issue.
When anyone chooses to run for a public position, they are knowingly opening themselves up to greater public scrutiny about their personal lives. When it’s the highest office in the land being sought, then everything’s on the table. That would include personal marital infidelities (Donald Trump), those of your spouse (Clinton), questionable business practices (both) and even your physical fitness.
The commander-in-chief is a demanding position that requires sound judgment even under exhausting circumstances. Voters have a right to know how well the person they’re choosing is.
Neither the Democratic nor Republican nominee has satisfactorily answered those questions despite their ages (Clinton is 68 and Trump 70), making it even more of an issue than normal.
Clinton has so far released much more personal medical data than Trump, but not enough to know with certainty her true health status. She had a concussion and blood clot around New Year’s 2012 and had some weak moments physically on the campaign trail before Sunday’s stumble at a 9/11 memorial in New York.
Voters can’t be expected to take Clinton’s campaign fully at its word when it says it was caused by pneumonia. Although it would be surprising if that were an outright lie, knowing Clinton’s history of manipulating the truth, it’s possible that it contains only part of the story.
The Clinton camp’s initial explanation for her swoon on Sunday was, in fact, misleading. It said that the candidate “overheated.” That raised eyebrows because it was only in the upper 70s or lower 80s, according to various news reports. Perhaps it’s technically true that Clinton overheated, yet her spokesmen omitted the part that she overheated because she had pneumonia.
The story line coming from Clinton herself Monday was that she only learned late last week that she had developed pneumonia and shared that information only with her closest aides. If that is true, why the need for secrecy? Everyone understands that people in the public pick up germs and get sick. What they don’t understand is why Clinton has this predisposition to shade or hide the truth, even when such lack of transparency seems totally unnecessary.
Meanwhile, Trump, in an apparent attempt to take political advantage of Clinton’s illness, said Monday that he just recently had a physical and will release the results later this week when he gets them back. We’ll believe that when we see them.
Before this, Trump’s only offer of his physical soundness was the laughable testimony of his longtime personal physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, who wrote a one-page letter in December that included the line, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
That kind of exaggeration — how is it possible for anyone to know how healthy, must less unequivocally so, presidents of the past were when taking office? — does not seem to be the generally cautious language of scientifically minded medical professionals. It does, however, have the familiar ring of the hyperbolic rhetoric of one Donald Trump.
When NBC asked him about it, Bornstein replied, “I like that sentence to be quite honest with you, and all the rest of them are either sick or dead.”
No wonder Trump has gone to the guy for all these years.
