Amie Parnes writes in The Hill about the complaints among Clinton “allies and confidents” over her “lack of transparency about her health.”
A lack of transparency about her health has turned what might have been a non-issue into a hugely problematic storyline for Hillary Clinton that could plague the Democratic presidential nominee into November, say allies and confidants.
One ally described the string of events that culminated in Clinton leaving a Sept. 11 memorial early as a “self-inflicted f—ing nightmare.”
Clinton’s campaign sought to deal with the fallout on Monday of damaging video that showed Clinton’s knees buckling and Secret Service agents helping her into a van. The campaign later revealed that the Democratic nominee was suffering from pneumonia.
David Axelrod, who served as a senior adviser to President Obama, slapped Clinton and the campaign for unnecessarily withholding information from the public.
“Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia,” Axelrod wrote on Twitter. “What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”
Behind the scenes, the criticism was even more withering. And it came at a time when the campaign’s post-campaign trajectory appeared to stall, with polls showing Trump gaining on Clinton’s lead.
A second ally said Clinton and her team probably wanted to withhold that she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday so that conservatives who have been raising questions about her health wouldn’t have ammunition.
Yet in withholding the information and allowing Clinton to go forward with an event that she was not able to handle, they made the situation worse.
“Why couldn’t the campaign just have been above board about this?” a second ally questioned. “She got sick, tell people she’s sick and move on. I know they thought it would give the right wingers something to pounce on but who cares?”
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