Panic contagious in Democratic ranks

OPINION:

Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia, being of the bacterial and not the viral persuasion, is apparently not contagious. It’s safe to shake her hand and share a cough. But the panic afflicting the Democrats is clearly contagious. Panic is Hillary’s most obvious contribution to the 2016 race. She sees handwriting on the wall, and it’s a warning writ large that something is gaining on her.

When she stumbled into her SUV after fainting, or becoming “overheated” or whatever it was on Sunday morning, the Secret Service agents tried to follow agency protocol and take her to the nearest emergency room. But she insisted that her aides countermand those instructions, and take her to her daughter’s apartment, to avoid examination in an unfamiliar emergency room. She recovered enough over the next two hours to return to a crowd in the street to remark on “what a glorious day in New York” the day honoring the dead of Sept. 11 turned out to be.

Vague rumors, becoming not so vague, nevertheless continue to swirl about her. Some are credible, some are reasonable but unlikely, and some are off the wall, with causes ranging from Parkinson’s disease, a severe glandular disorder, to Alzheimer’s. One supermarket tabloid, floating the most pernicious rumor, that she’s suffering the first stages of Alzheimer’s, reports that as a symptom she is subject to “violent rages.” Rages are on the record — the famous flying lamps in the White House family quarters — but temper tantrums gone nuclear date from the governor’s mansion in Little Rock.

The panic in the streets has been fed by those in her own party. Indeed, the latest media rage against Donald Trump is that he is behaving like a gentleman, standing back not to interfere with Hillary while she inflicts her own wounds. Ted Strickland, the former Democratic governor of Ohio trying to unseat Sen. Rob Portman, the incumbent Republican, introduced Tim Kaine, Hillary’s running mate, with an assurance that he “is wonderfully prepared to be the vice president or the president if that ever became necessary.” That was hardly reassurance that the health of the candidate at the top of the ticket was at no risk of making that necessary.

Such an introduction, and its dark implications, naturally had to be “clarified,” and within hours he was telling reporters that he was talking about the future. After Don Fowler, the party chairman in the Clinton administration, suggested that it might be time to look again at the party procedures to name an emergency presidential nominee, he, too, slipped into clarification mode. What he meant was that there would be time enough for that after Hillary is safely on Pennsylvania Avenue again.

Morbid or not, this is talk that Hillary brought on herself. The party is paying the price for her paranoia and secrecy, and only now are the senior Democrats, who can’t believe she has been so uninspiring, inept and prone to boneheaded mistakes, looking for an explanation. They think in their bones that Donald Trump is a terrible candidate, that their ideas are better than his. Is this emergent Hillary all they can feed an adoring public everyone imagined was waiting impatiently to vote for her?

Her campaign has been lackluster, mean-spirited and disjointed, an unexpected amateur hour. Maybe, these senior Democrats are saying now, it’s her health after all. Her stumbles and falls have been explained as mere fatigue, and anyone who asks impertinent questions about the state of her health can be scorned as part of the vast right-wing media conspiracy. Reporters are warned to stay away from the issue.

But it’s her persona and her ideas that are the problem. She may be as healthy as she claims, but Hillary Clinton at the top of her game is fatally flawed. Blaming her own weakness and a faltering campaign on a conspiracy is pretty thin stuff now.

If she loses in November, which seems entirely possible as remote as that seemed only a fortnight ago, won’t be because she has health problems. Hillary’s problem is Hillary, and it’s too late to do anything about that.