As Rich notes, it really is amazing how invisible Hillary has been lately, and while there may have been something of a strategic decision to get out of Trump’s way while he was digging himself into one hole after another, you have to believe it’s at least partly related to her health issues. Riffing off a graphic from Sean Hannity, Leon Wolf over at RedState took a look at her public schedule for August:
Here is a list of the days when Clinton did absolutely nothing that is recorded on her campaign site for the month: August 2, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 27, 28, 29, 30. That’s 12 days without a single public event (I won’t say “off” because I don’t really know what she was doing, maybe she was busy doing private stuff) in a single month during the general election campaign. That’s really and truly incredible. And the vast majority of the days that she did have something, she had exactly one public event.
As Leon observes, this is a striking contrast to Trump, who has been holding rallies nearly every day to get the free media coverage his campaign depends on. It’s actually a role reversal for Trump: throughout the primaries, he was far less busy on the trail than some of his rivals (Ted Cruz was especially tireless), and in the opening weeks of the general election campaign in June, he was so confined to Trump Tower some of us were wondering if he’d run out of money to travel.
Every candidate has question marks over their head that need to be answered. One of Trump’s big ones, of course, is his temperament and decorum, and whether or not you think it worked, his visit to Mexico was a major effort to show the doubters wrong. When Ronald Reagan first ran for Governor of California, he had lots of audience Q&A events to show he wasn’t just an actor reading a script; by 1980 and 1984, Reagan had to demonstrate that his advanced age wasn’t an obstacle to doing the job (John McCain and Bob Dole had the same issue in 2008 and 1996, and both campaigned with furious energy to try to dispel it).
Even running against an opponent older than she is (as she did in the primaries), Hillary’s age and health have been open concerns for months now. It’s amazing to think she wouldn’t want to take those concerns head-on with a vigorous stump schedule – and logical to assume that her failure to do so is because she can’t.