Before we delve any further into the coughs heard round the world and the swoon that changed history, some perspective:
Running for US president isn’t hard. It’s brutal. The oddity isn’t that one of the candidates would succumb to illness and be forced off the trail for a few days. The oddity is that all of the candidates don’t drop like flies.
What we ask of them is less preparation than mortification, physical as well as psychological. Between formal speeches and informal rallies and briefings and fundraisers and long flights and short bus rides and coffee-shop huddles and state-fairground scrums, they endure 20-hour days in which they cram in twice that many hours of work. They’re miracles of perseverance, so much so that a certain 68-year-old Democratic nominee can get a pneumonia diagnosis and deliver a big (if cloddishly rendered) speech at a fundraiser that same night.
Their stamina isn’t at issue, just their sanity.
Americans haven’t learned anything new about Hillary Clinton’s penchant for secrecy. They’ve had it confirmed — for the millionth time. Her self-protection is a perverse form of self-destruction. It’s borderline pathological. But it’s something that most voters accepted or rejected somewhere along the quarter-century timeline from Travelgate to her emails. A roadside crumpling and a round of antibiotics aren’t going to change that.
Her lack of transparency might well be disqualifying if her opponent were the political equivalent of freshly Windexed glass. Her opponent is the political equivalent of a thickly armoured car.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump won’t show us his taxes. He won’t illuminate his philanthropic activity or the workings of his charity, which, according to David Fahrenthold’s terrific reporting in The Washington Post, operates in a bizarrely self-aggrandising fashion.
He’s promising more detailed health information and a sit-down with Dr Oz, who is Trump with a stethoscope, approaching matters of great seriousness with great silliness.
But what Trump presented previously — a few gushing sentences from a physician who later admitted to ginning them up on the fly — was a Valentine’s Day card masquerading as medicine. I’m surprised there weren’t hearts and Cupids in the margins.
Apart from it, there’s no evidence of Trump as Hercules. More like Nero, with a coterie of sycophants fanning him and peeling his grapes.
He’s the master of phoning in to news shows rather than appearing on set, which would require more exertion. He has often done just one event a day, near an airport, so he can fly home in his plush private jet and sleep in his own comfy bed. He’s the rare exception to the slog I described above. During the primaries, it was huge news when he finally overnighted in a chain hotel in Iowa and, that same weekend, sat through all 60 minutes of a church service. Praise the Lord and pass the Gatorade.
Although his hair refuses to accept it, he’s 70 years old, and if there’s footage out there of him doing the P90X workout, I missed it. I have seen him playing golf, which isn’t much more aerobically demanding than backgammon.
Naysaying about health
All of this makes him a singularly ineffective critic of Clinton’s health. And his surrogates and supporters are bungling the case by overstating it. To hear them talk, she’s some sporadically animated cadaver, a mashup of Weekend at Bernie’s and The Candidate. They’re going to look ridiculous when she stands sturdily on the debate stage for 90 minutes and speaks in sentences fuller, more coherent and more grammatical than his.
Of course events could unfold differently. She could have a debate so terrible that naysaying about her health is the least of her worries. She could continue to struggle with illness, compromising the intensity with which she stumps. She could shortchange us on the additional medical records that she has rightly pledged to share, yanking her campaign off message yet again. She could have a lurking malady — as could Trump. But we don’t have any more proof of her physical unfitness for the presidency than we did a week ago. There’s no clear link between the blood clot of 2013 and Sunday’s swoon.
What we have is a stress-aggravated instance of frailty from one of two senior citizens engaged in a marathon. Will it really eclipse the race’s other dynamics?
In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, only 36 per cent of respondents said that Trump was qualified to be president. I can’t imagine any one of the other 64 per cent reasoning: “He’s ignorant, but so robustly ignorant. A liar, but such a strapping one. Forget those hateful tirades; look at those cholesterol levels.” I can’t see her coughing fits excusing his hissy fits, which are scarier and harder to cure.
—New York Times News Service
Nicholas Kristof is an American journalist, author, op-ed columnist and a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes.
