With the first presidential debate just 14 days away, the last 7 have been anything but kind to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. National and swing state polls have started to tighten, showing Republican nominee Donald Trump within striking distance.
First there was a major coughing fit last Monday at a rally in Cleveland followed by another one when she gave her first press conference in 2016 to assembled reporters on her campaign plane. Then there was the “Commander in Chief” forum on NBC last Wednesday in which former Secretary of State Clinton was on the defensive regarding questions about her use of a private email server. For full details on that forum, you can read about it here my recent post. Two days later, Mrs. Clinton referred to half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Finally, on Sunday, the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she nearly collapsed after leaving the memorial ceremony prematurely. The cause of Mrs. Clinton’s ill health was later revealed be due to a case of walking pneumonia.
Both the “basket of deplorables” comment and the pneumonia diagnosis occurred on Friday and have Democrats in a mild state of panic over the prospect of the bombastic billionaire Trump becoming President of the United States.
Let’s start first with the health issue. The news broke early Sunday morning. Mrs. Clinton, who will turn 69 years of age before the November election, was attending the 9/11 Memorial service at Ground Zero. About an hour after she arrived, she was abruptly escorted away.
One hour and 40 minutes later (at 11:03a ET), her campaign released a statement that she was overheated and left for daughter Chelsea’s apartment (which is on Madison and 26th Street in lower Manhattan, not far away from Ground Zero).
At 11:47a, in a clearly staged media event, Mrs. Clinton emerged from the apartment, waving to the crowd, hugging a young child, and looking very much like this was all no big deal. She, her entourage and Secret Service detail then departed for her house in Chappaqua, about an hour north in Westchester County. But what we didn’t know yet was that Secretary Clinton had nearly collapsed and had to be held up when she was entering the van that would take her away.
Because the travelling press corps was not permitted to follow Mrs. Clinton when she left the service, we wouldn’t have known about this if it weren’t for a private citizen who shot the video, a 20-second clip which you can see by clicking here. What we then discovered over five hours after Mrs. Clinton left Chelsea’s apartment was that she was not just overheated but that she was suffering from walking pneumonia, a diagnosis she had received two days prior.
There are two issues in play here: the first is the state of Secretary Clinton’s health in general and the second is the her campaign’s initial attempt to cover up her condition. Let me dispatch with the second issue first, the predictable lack of transparency. Mrs. Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday but this wasn’t revealed to the public until late on Sunday. If she had not been forced to leave the 9/11 event prematurely and if had not been for the viral video of her near collapse, would we ever have known? Every instinct of Mrs. Clinton and her campaign is to obfuscate, in this case to the detriment of the candidate. If she had pneumonia, she shouldn’t have been at the 9/11 Memorial on a hot and sticky day (the doctor had urged her to alter her schedule after the diagnosis was given). Then, after she nearly collapsed entering the van, she should have been taken to a hospital, according to Dr. John Torres (an emergency room physician and an MSNBC contributor). In fact, today the New York Post reported that the van was on the way to a hospital but that a campaign operative re-directed it to Chelsea’s apartment.
Once again, Hillary and her campaign have given more fodder to those who feel she is dishonest and untrustworthy.
The tougher issue to tackle is Mrs. Clinton’s health in general. I’m not a doctor but I know a little more about one of her health conditions than your average 49-year-old man and more than I’d like to. In 1998, at the age of 50, Hillary had a blood clot in her right leg. Doctors found another clot in her legs in 2009. Blood clots in the leg are known as Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) and other frequent flying politicians (notably Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle) have also been afflicted with the condition.
More notably (and more generally known) was an incident in 2012 when Mrs. Clinton, dehydrated from a viral infection, fell and suffered a concussion. During follow-up tests after the concussion, doctors discovered a blood clot in her skull and her husband said it took her six months to fully recover. In her recent interview with the FBI regarding her private email server, Secretary Clinton reportedly invoked the concussion as perhaps a reason why should couldn’t remember multiple State Department briefings about the preservation of government records during her transition out of the job of Secretary of State.
Because of the multiple blood clots, Mrs. Clinton is on Coumadin, a blood-thinning medication which is designed to prevent clots from ever occurring again. I’m very familiar with this because I was diagnosed with DVT when I had a blood clot in my leg in 2011. Because a small clot had drifted up near my lungs, it was a severe enough to cause me to be hospitalized for four days. This was a life-threatening condition and, because my younger brother had had a more severe clot several years earlier and my father had a similar condition later in his life, the doctor determined I should be on blood thinners for life because our family history made us susceptible for more clots. Because millions of people get walking pneumonia and recover quickly and because many people live long and otherwise healthy lives while taking Coumadin (or its generic version Warfarin) and based on my own ability to live normally on blood thinners, I’m inclined to side with those who say that there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton is medically unfit to serve.
For months, Donald Trump had been saying that Hillary doesn’t have the “stamina” to be the President. After her near fainting incident this Sunday, Mr. Trump wisely resisted his normal impulse to issue a “I told you so” Tweet. He instead simply wished her well and hoped for a speedy recovery. But I have to tell you: Trump’s assertions have planted a seed.
The coughing fits that Mrs. Clinton had last week were not new. Before we knew about the real diagnosis, she blamed the coughing on seasonal allergies. Personally, as an allergy sufferer since age 10, I was calling BS on that right away. Typically, when you’re bothered by allergies, you sneeze. When you’re coughing, it’s because of something in your throat or lungs. Now, the reason this is relevant is that I recall multiple other times during the campaign season that Mrs. Clinton has coughed like that. Those coughing fits mean something. They probably mean very little, but they mean something and I think the people deserve to know that that something is.
As I said above, millions of people get walking pneumonia and recover quickly. However, it is also true that the recovery time can be longer for people older than 65 so you can be sure, with the first debate just two weeks away, that there will be intense scrutiny to Mrs. Clinton’s appearance and demeanor. The status of her health, which was widely considered to be no more than Trump and his surrogates throwing out conspiracy theories, has become a legitimate campaign issue.
For any candidate to be the leader of the free world but especially with candidates who would be 69 or 70 when they take the oath of office, health status is fundamentally relevant. It was relevant in 2008, when the then-72-year-old John McCain released nearly 1,200 pages of medical records. Because of Sunday’s incident, I would expect that Mrs. Clinton’s team to release more of hers in the next few weeks to dispel any conspiracy theories which will put pressure on the 70-year old Trump to do the same, which he has said he will do possibly this week.
OK, let’s move on from the health issue and onto the “basket of deplorables” comment. Many have compared the comment to the one made by Mitt Romney in 2012 about the “47% of Americans” who don’t pay taxes and would vote for President Obama no matter what because they feel entitled or feel like victims.
For the record, here is Mrs. Clinton’s deplorable quote:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that… Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
— Hillary Clinton (Friday, Sept. 9, 2016)
She then described the “other half.”
“That other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change…. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.”
— Hillary Clinton (Friday, Sept. 9, 2016)
Speaking for myself, not a Trump supporter but a lifelong Republican, I have many friends who are Trump supporters (some ardent, some reluctant) and none of them remotely belong in that “basket of deplorables.” But there are many (and I am among them) who feel that government has let them down. Still, based on the size of the likely electorate and Trump’s current support of 40% of it, the “deplorable” basket would number about 30 million Americans.
The next day, realizing that she might have just had a Romney 47% moment, Hillary apologized, sort of. She said she regretted saying “half.” So, if she regrets saying “half,” it begs the question as to what percentage of the Trump supporting population she feels are irredeemable and deplorable. 10%? 25%? 40%? What’s the number, Mrs. Clinton?
Will the “basket of deplorables” comment hurt Clinton’s campaign or not? I’m not sure. Trump and his campaign are certainly trying to make hay out of it but I don’t think the media is going to cooperate as they did with Romney in 2012.
Hillary used five pejorative terms to describe Trump supporters: racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic. It is absolutely true that there is a xenophobic and Islamaphobic tenor to a lot of Trump’s rhetoric. When it comes to racism, sexism or homophobia, the link is more tenuous. While it’s true that Trump has made sexist remarks during the campaign, I don’t see any evidence that they have animated his voters. As for racism or homophobia, Democrats make those charges against Republicans all the time so there’s nothing new there.
So it’s true that there are some Trump supporters who embody those five negative characteristics. But it is also true that our society is far too quick to label somebody “racist” or “sexist” or “homophobic” because they don’t hold the politically “acceptable” viewpoints. Are people who object to gay marriage due to their religion by definition homophobic? Are people who object to the Black Lives Matter movement because it demonizes all police officers by definition racist?
Tying this back to the issue of Hillary Clinton’s health, I actually was personally accused last night on Facebook of being an “ageist” because I asserted that pneumonia in an “elderly” person was a serious issue. A classmate of mine from Yale, 49 years old as I am, objected to the term “elderly” and I agreed since we’re only 16 years away from that age. A better term would have been “older” or specifically “older than 65” because it is true that pneumonia can be more serious the older you are. Anyway, someone else on this Facebook thread, someone I don’t know and doesn’t know a thing about me, called me an “ageist.”
The point of my boring story is that people today tend to refer to other people that they don’t agree with an “ist” or “phobe” without knowing what’s in the other’s heart. This is what Hillary Clinton did when she put half of Trump’s supporters in a “bucket of deplorables.” This campaign has been a race to the bottom, the most negative campaign we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Trump is absolutely responsible for a great deal of this negativity. Just as Hillary put half of his supporters in a deplorable bucket, Trump did the same thing at the very beginning by calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers. What Hillary did last Friday is break one of the cardinal rules of politics: attack your opponents, not his voters. She put herself in the same basket as Trump, a candidate who demonizes millions of others indiscriminately. Deplorable.
Thanks for reading.
Chris Bodig