Until Sunday, it was considered conspiracy-mongering to question Hillary Clinton’s health. That isn’t the case any more.
At a Sept. 11 commemoration event, Clinton collapsed getting into her vehicle while leaving early. The whole thing was caught on camera. She didn’t just stumble — from a short distance on camera, she appeared to fall completely. Even though her campaign manager insisted on CNN Monday that she didn’t lose consciousness, she was only held up from falling to the ground by the campaign and security staff surrounding her.
Recall that in 2012, just before she was supposed to testify at a hearing on Benghazi, Clinton suffered a collapse in private that sounds somewhat similar. On that occasion, as on this one, the incident was described as being related to dehydration.
Clinton’s campaign is now coming under pressure to be transparent, for a change, about her precise health situation. And rightly so.
The belated revelation that she was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday does not in itself cast a damning light on her health — after all, anyone can get pneumonia, and most people can recover with rest and treatment. But the fact that her campaign kept it quiet, and that she attended an event two days after her diagnosis, demonstrates her campaign’s commitment to secrecy. Once again, as with every deception Team Clinton put out regarding her email situation, the inclination is to cover up anything that looks like bad news for them, no matter how certain it is to come out eventually.
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lungs. It affects breathing and can range from mild to life-threatening. It usually results from an underlying viral or bacterial infection. It can sometimes indicate just a flu that’s gotten out of control, but it can also be a complication from a much more serious problem with a person’s health — even Parkinson’s Disease.
Either way, recovery — especially in a 68-year-old — requires a period of rest. So why did Clinton attend a public event on Sunday when she was diagnosed with an acute condition like this on Friday? Did her staff permit this because they are concerned about keeping up the appearance of full health? If so, their careless concealment has backfired once again.
The lesson is that a little bit of transparency goes a long way. And conversely, a campaign that consistently hides information, and even hides its candidate from the media, earns the public’s distrust. In this case, they have also put into bounds all kinds of wild and damaging speculation that they can no longer control, because at this point you’d have to be crazy to take anything they say as an honest and complete explanation of the situation.
Clinton has now canceled this week’s travel to recover — a wise decision, and we wish and expect her to have a speedy recovery. But it’s a lot easier to recover from pneumonia than from the secrecy and paranoia that seems to be in driver’s seat of her campaign.
