Clinton’s bout of pneumonia raises worries for Democrats
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrat Hillary Clinton’s case of pneumonia, kept secret until she nearly collapsed on Sunday, has raised an element of uncertainty about her health going into the final weeks of presidential campaigning.
The Clinton campaign disclosed on Sunday that the 68-year-old Democratic presidential nominee had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, after she complained of allergies and was seen coughing repeatedly in recent days.
The pneumonia disclosure was made public hours after her campaign said she had become “overheated” to explain why, knees buckling and unsteady, she was rushed from a ceremony marking the September 11 attacks in New York.
Clinton’s campaign acknowledged on Monday that it mishandled a health
scare for the Democratic candidate, and promised to release additional medical details in the coming days.
“I think that in retrospect, we could have handled it better in terms of providing more information more quickly,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon told MSNBC.
He said the campaign was too focused on making sure Clinton was well instead of releasing information.
Her rival, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, said on Monday that health is an issue in the election campaign. Trump said he would soon release detailed information about his own health.
Asked by Fox News about the health of the candidates, Trump said, “I think it’s an issue. In fact... this last week I took a physical and... when the numbers come in, I’ll be releasing very, very specific numbers.”
Trump, 70, has been suggesting for weeks that Clinton lacks the energy needed to be president. He has raised questions about her stamina, mirroring a strategy used during the Republican primary campaign when he derided rival Jeb Bush as a “low-energy” candidate.
Clinton’s health issue was the latest blow for the Democratic candidate, at a time when Trump has erased most of her lead in national opinion polls and is competitive again in many battleground states where the election is likely to be decided.
Clinton’s dismissal on Friday of half of Trump’s supporters as a racists and homophobes – “a basket of deplorables” triggered a firestorm of criticism and she later said she regretted the comment.
Trump said the remark was “the single biggest mistake of the political season,” which he compared to a much criticized comment by 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney that 47 percent of the electorate were dependent on government.
“Remember this... You’re going to be president of all the people. You’re not president of 50 percent or 75 percent,” Trump told Fox News. His campaign released a television commercial on Monday accusing Clinton of “demonizing” working people by making the comment.
Clinton’s campaign is likely to be pressed on why she did not make her pneumonia diagnosis public until late Sunday.
“I think it’s exceedingly important that Hillary Clinton be transparent about what’s going on,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “If she gets a report of pneumonia on Friday, they should try to tell the public in real time. The danger for a candidate is if they seem to be hiding their health history.”
Critics say Clinton has a tendency toward secrecy, an accusation that fueled a debate about her use of a private email server rather than a government one, while she was President Barack Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
After the disclosure about pneumonia, Clinton canceled a two-day trip to California which was scheduled to begin Monday morning. In recent weeks, multiple staff members at Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, have fallen ill, and several aides required medical treatment, a campaign aide said.
Trump aides did not immediately respond to questions about whether Trump would seek to use the Clinton health incident to his advantage. Trump, normally voluble on Twitter, stayed silent on the issue on Sunday.
“I expect they will milk it like crazy,” Republican strategist Art Hackney said of the Trump campaign. “He certainly has already indicated that she doesn’t have the stamina, so I think it will be used, absolutely.”
The health incident put pressure on both Clinton and Trump to reassure American voters about their health, given the rigors of the presidential campaign in which the food is often unhealthy, sleep is elusive, and the packed schedule and extensive travel is stressful.
“The short-term turbulence will be more about the handling of this than the substance, though I’m sure both candidates will be pressed for greater disclosure of health records,” said David Axelrod, a former adviser to Obama.
Trump is expected to discuss his own health regimen in an interview to air on Thursday with celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz.
However, he has made less information available about his health than Clinton has. Last December, he released a statement from his doctor, Harold Bornstein, which described him in excellent health with “extraordinary” strength and stamina.
The statement did not mention what medicine Trump might be taking or other details typically included in such disclosures. It was dramatically different from the hundreds of pages of medical records released by Republican nominee John McCain in 2008 to reassure Americans about his battle with skin cancer.
“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Bornstein wrote. The Manhattan physician said in August he wrote the letter in five minutes as a Trump limo waited to pick it up.
Clinton released a two-page letter outlining her medical condition in July 2015 that sought to reassure Americans about her health, after she fell and suffered a concussion at home in 2012 near the end of her tenure at the State Department. •