One of Hillary Clinton’s favorite riffs is to recount all the investigations she has endured and smile and say “And they haven’t got me yet.”
That may be about to change. No, the furtive conservative dream to see her in an orange jumpsuit won’t come true anytime soon. But her dream is to become president, and the cumulative effect of all these scandals might well now stand in the way.
Last Sunday, Clinton slipped out of a 9-11 event at Ground Zero in New York so abruptly her Secret Service detail could not get her vehicle to the meeting place on time. A jarring video Americans will never forget showed her list to the left, right herself with help from an agent, then collapse before she could get into the van.
Nothing was wrong, her campaign said at first. Then, she was dehydrated. Then, it was allergies. Then, finally, the campaign admitted Clinton had been diagnosed with pneumonia on the previous Friday. That was four stories in one day, then another a day later when Bill Clinton called it the flu.
The campaign has admitted it could’ve handled this better, which is like Custer admitting he could’ve handled Little Big Horn better. Meanwhile, Americans wonder if she is much more ill than she has let on and whether they’ll ever get a straight story about it.
If they haven’t at this point, it’s unlikely they will. In one of the recently released Colin Powell emails, Powell’s friend who is a large Democratic Party donor tells Powell that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he and Hillary both gave speeches at the same event, and she could barely get up the stairs to the podium. The email was dated March 2015, and the incident took place several weeks before that, the emailer said.
I worked on the John McCain campaign in 2008, and he too had to prove he could withstand the rigors of the job. He set the gold standard for medical disclosure and was disbelieved anyway. More than two-thirds of Americans don’t think Clinton is honest to start with. She’ll never be believed, no matter what she releases.
It’s not just the video and the evolving explanations. It’s not just the previous incidents when she seemed confused or in danger of falling. It’s her lifelong compulsion to obfuscate and prevaricate, and it finally may have caught up to her.
Her enablers in the media can’t help much on this one, not after CBS news got caught editing out a remark by Bill Clinton that his wife “frequently” collapses from dehydration.
It doesn’t appear Donald Trump will bail her out this time either. He mostly has steered clear of the issue with one exception – pointing out that she probably would not survive an hour in the unpleasantly warm room where he was speaking.
Trump, who has questioned Clinton’s stamina for months, went for a physical last week and presented the results on TV on Thursday with Dr. Oz, who said he was 15 pounds overweight but otherwise in top shape. The Clinton campaign has challenged the results and demanded more, but the fact is he has not fallen into any vans on video lately, and she has.
There’s also the matter of the debates, which begin Sept. 26. Clinton returned to the campaign trail on Thursday with an event in Greeneville, N.C. But is she ready for a 90-minute brawl with the unpredictable Trump? She has asked to sit down for the debates rather than stand at podiums as candidates traditionally do. How will this be perceived?
Clinton rested for half of August and a week of September, but there are no days off between now and Nov. 8. She’ll be in front of voters and reporters every day. Is she up to it? What if she isn’t?
A related and perhaps more serious problem is that a pattern has been established. Trump launches a charge – that she and the party rigged the primaries, that her emails would reveal pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation and, more recently, that she was not healthy. Democrats then say he’s crazy, baying at the moon, only to have him proven correct in short order.
Americans have been trained at this point to take what Hillary Clinton says with a grain of salt. Now, she wants them to believe her when she says she is “fit to serve,” as her doctor said.
Can we? The truth is we don’t know how sick she is, and we don’t think we have a reliable way to find out. That’s not good for her, and there doesn’t seem to be much she can do about it.
Ford O’Connell is the chairman of CivicForumPAC, worked on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and is author of the book “Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery.” Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
