Krauthammer’s Take: Pneumonia Could Have Earned Sympathy If Clinton Camp ‘Were Honest and Clever’

Charles Krauthammer does not think the Hillary Clinton campaign would have disclosed anything about her health without Sunday’s video, and to him this shows a lack of foresight, not just of honesty:

The video is always decisive — for everything. You go back to Ferguson. You go back to the Somali invasion in ‘92, it was because of the video. Video of the ISIS executions — if you take that away, we are in a different world. But seeing her slip, seeing her helpless, can be devastating. That’s why they should have been out there right away.

The irony is, you could have — if they had been honest and clever — you play this for sympathy, and also to show determination. This is a woman who has been campaigning 18 months, has pneumonia, perseveres, and you might have been able to turn it around, a bit like the tear in the New Hampshire primary in 2008. But instead, they go into cover-up mode and they make it worse.

She’s not going to withdraw over a walking pneumonia, if that’s all there is. If you have pneumonia underlying, and you have seasonal allergies, you add it on to that, you can end up with a nasty cough. That’s the obvious explanation unless they are hiding something really bad.