Where’s Hillary?

On October 3, Madame Secretary was in Ohio. She spoke at events in Toledo and Akron. The next day she was in Pennsylvania, speaking at Haverford and Harrisburg, where she informed the crowd that “voting is important, because it gives everyone a voice” and assured Trump supporters that if she is elected, she will be their president, too. Hillary even held a 13-minute, 40-second presser after the speech, where she took half a dozen questions. (She did not recall suggesting that Julian Assange be “droned,” and if she did make the comment, it was a joke.) Then Hillary disappeared. Surrogates have been speaking for her and will continue to do so until October 10, when she’s scheduled to appear at a voter registration event in Detroit and a rally in Columbus. She’ll fly out to San Francisco for a fundraiser on the 13th but will not appear in public between the 10th and the final debate on the 19th. Her campaign schedule runs through the 23rd, and she has no further events planned. This means that apart from the two events this Monday and the 90-minute debates on the 9th and 19th, Hillary will not show her face for twenty days.

No chance for the cameras to catch her chronic cough, her exotropia (failure of her eyes to converge when looking outward), her dyskinesia (involuntary head movements in response to lights and noise), her tremors, her freezes, her falls. And she’ll have plenty of time to take drug holidays – structured treatment interruptions – to increase the effectiveness of her medications when she resumes treatment just before a debate. The failure to campaign in October is without precedent in any American presidential election in living memory. Even in 1944, FDR, in failing health and confined to his wheelchair, campaigned vigorously in October. The media, of course, is studiously ignoring Hillary’s hibernation. Donald Trump shouldn’t. During her Harrisburg press conference, Clinton was asked about undecided voters. “We’re working as hard as we can during the next 35 years (laughing) – days – to reach as many undecided voters as possible,” she replied. The remaining days of the campaign must seem like years to Clinton. She has to stay out of the public view while ostensibly running for president and pray that Assange and National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard have no unpleasant surprises.