For some on the left, the big problem was that we got to watch. If only there had been no video of Hillary Clinton stumbling and needing to be literally hauled into her car as she unexpectedly fled the 9/11 commemoration in New York, the furor over her illness would either never have happened or not seemed so bad. If we hadn’t seen her momentary collapse, perhaps her campaign would not have been forced, after several awkward hours while the nation speculated about what was really going on, to tell us that the Democratic presidential nominee had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday.
That was the conceit of a piece in the New York Times by Susan Dominus, in which she shares the pain of Clinton supporters “watching and wincing as Clinton stumbles.” To her, the whole business was Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor come to life. Sontag’s essay asserts that language is used to blame the victims of illness as weaklings and is a common tactic to suppress women.
But that complaint misses the reason why Clinton’s illness is a problem for her presidential hopes. The problem here isn’t so much that Donald Trump and some of his supporters have been trying to portray her as weak in a manner that might fairly be characterized as sexist. It’s that the Clinton campaign machine’s obsessive secrecy about her illness is of a piece with the candidate’s behavior on other issues. Her secrecy isn’t a metaphor; it’s a symptom of a belief that honesty is a general human requirement from which she and her husband are exempt.
They lied for days about a situation they continue to minimize but which health experts tell us can be a serious problem for people Clinton’s age. All of which has prompted reasonable people to ask a simple question: Why?
That’s the same question both Clinton supporters and critics have continued to ask about her bizarre decision to use a private email address operated from an insecure homebrew server while she was secretary of state. The point of that exercise, just like Clinton’s refusal to allow the standard protective press pool to accompany her on the campaign trail, is to shield her from the normal scrutiny those in public life must accept. One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy maven to believe that all that dangerous secrecy and Clinton’s inability to stop lying about it were intended to cover up possible conflicts of interest involving the Clinton Foundation or other shady behavior.
It is that context that makes her otherwise inexplicable decision to try to cover up an illness so damning. Even if you are prepared to discount the rumors being floated about her health and accept that a few days of rest and antibiotics will make her right as rain, what we observed is what former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod called “an unhealthy penchant for privacy” in the Clintons that has destroyed what was left of her credibility.
Now, when it comes to transparency, Donald Trump is in no position to complain. Until we have his tax returns, we’ll never know if half the things he says about his business career or charitable giving are true, not to mention the possibility of conflicts of interest should he wind up in the White House. But Trump’s bad record is no excuse for someone like Clinton, who still has the gall to speak of herself as if she were a paragon of accountability.
What that painful video proved was that Clinton’s allergy to the truth isn’t merely a polling meme but a powerful insight into the way she operates. If the emails didn’t cost her the trust of the American people—and they should have—the lies about her health may now do the trick. Instead of buying into the myth that she is a victim, what we need to recognize is Hillary Clinton’s secretive approach to both politics and governing is antithetical to the normal give-and-take of democracy.
