Campaign via Remote Control- Hillary in Absentia
One has to hand it to Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton. Never in our lifetimes has anyone ever been a major party’s nominee and has exerted less effort in running for the nation’s highest office. Not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection campaign has a candidate spent less time, well, campaigning for president, following his/her respective nominating convention, and FDR was running for his fourth term, for cryin’ out loud!
In the month of August, Hillary Clinton was absent from campaigning for seventeen of the thirty-one days comprising the eighth month of the year. Her participation in September has even been more lackluster, as she has been absent for all but a few days since the beginning of this month.
Compare that to her Republican rival, Donald J Trump, who has scarcely taken a day off from campaigning since his nomination in mid-July. If the election were determined strictly by a candidate’s personal effort, Trump would win by a landslide of epic proportions.
It’s not that Hillary’s campaign itself has lagged…no, not by a longshot. Her surrogates have been feverishly running for president in her stead. From her running mate Tim Kaine, to her husband Bill Clinton, to her daughter, Chelsea, to even the current office-holder, Barack Obama, the Democrats’ “A-listers” have been putting forth their maximum efforts to make her the next president, while she has spent much of her time resting with her feet up in her Chappaqua, New York mansion.
Any doctor worthy of his/her license to practice will tell you that older people who lay about too much risk acquiring pneumonia, and if that is what truly ails Mrs. Clinton (one can’t be sure of anything related to Mrs. Clinton), it is certainly understandable why she might need some downtime. Then again, considering news reports (assuming that is what they are, given her adoring media) that she was only diagnosed with a mild case of bacterial pneumonia in one of her right lung’s lobes last Friday, why the light schedule since she was nominated in July?
Having had both viral and bacterial pneumonia on a few occasions ourselves (one episode so serious that our lung capacity was reduced by two-thirds), we do know that seizure-like collapses, as was hers on Sunday the 11th of September, don’t happen…not like that, anyway. While her doctor’s report that she hasn’t developed any new conditions (other than the pneumonia, bronchitis, ear and sinus infections, etc.) in the past year, and that qualifier does not necessarily mean that there aren’t other conditions that might have already been present, prior to this past year.
While we admittedly lack the medical training and therefore are certainly in no position to proffer diagnoses on Mrs. Clinton’s condition, her episodes of fainting, frequently occurring over the years (according to her husband), are suggestive of a neurological disorder most frequently found in sufferers of advanced Parkinson’s disease. It has been noted that such patients who suffer these types of episodes find that wearing sunglasses with cobalt blue lenses aids in preventing such episodes, not unlike the shades seen on the first lady, as she was wearing when she emerged from her daughter’s apartment a few hours after her collapse.
While it can be said that Hillary Clinton is always ready, able and willing to show up for any and every campaign event where money is being offered up in large sums, her presence out on the stump has largely been lackluster and comparatively brief, with most of the rousing speeches being delivered by her surrogates, instead. Given the secrecy and obfuscation that is the sine qua non of all things Clinton, it is certainly not outside the realm of possibilities that Mrs. Clinton suffers from something much more serious than a slight case of pneumonia and puts into question her physical fitness for the job of being president, notwithstanding the glowing report released from her own doctor. Given the right incentive and the right individual, a patient’s doctor can say anything that a patient wants them to say- after all, a patient’s actual medical profile is entirely confidential, when one gets down to it.
This much is certain. If Mrs. Clinton suffers such a seizure again, in front of cameras, that is to say, her fitness for service will rightfully come into question, and her viability as a presidential candidate will come to a cease. That said, running a campaign via remote control is not going to help her in her quest to defeat a tour-de-force like Donald Trump, and a Hillary-in-absentia cannot, nor should not, prevail in November’s election.
After all, she’s no FDR…
-Drew Nickell, 15 September 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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