Things got ugly fast between the Sanders and Bloomberg campaigns after Sen. Bernie Sanders said he would not be releasing more complete medical records. At a CNN town hall Tuesday night, Sanders said “I don’t think we will” be releasing anything beyond the letters from three doctors he released in late December. Defending that decision on CNN Wednesday morning, Sanders’ press secretary Briahna Joy Gray compared calls for Sanders’ medical records to birtherism. “And it’s really telling,” she continued, “given that none of the same concern is being demonstrated for Michael Bloomberg, who’s the same age as Bernie Sanders, who has suffered heart attacks in the past.”
“It is a lie. Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the left. I honestly can't tell the difference in their campaigns,” a Bloomberg campaign spokesperson quickly told CNN, and Gray later said that she “mispoke when I said Bloomberg had a heart attack. Rather, he underwent the same stent procedure as Bernie.” There’s a big difference between a heart attack and a stent procedure, though.
A billionaire trying to leverage his billions into the presidency 100% should not be calling anyone else “the Trump of the left” (although to be sure, no one would call Bloomberg the anything of the left), and Bloomberg, who is 78 years old and has reportedly had an irregular heartbeat and stents, absolutely should release his own medical records. But equally, Sanders should face questions on this front, and he’s going to need to have better answers than Briahna Joy Gray is giving.
“I think that the American people deserve to know exactly as much as every other candidate has released in this race currently and historically,” Gray said Wednesday morning, right before she said “And what you’re seeing right now is really reminiscent of the kind of smear, kind of skepticism campaigns that have been run against a lot of different candidates in the past, questioning where they’re from, aspects of their lineage, et cetera et cetera.”
Which, no. Asking a presidential candidate to release medical records after a heart attack is not reminiscent of claiming that a black president could not possibly have been born in the United States. And it is not—at this point—a smear campaign, though it certainly could provide fodder for a truly vicious one going forward, and the Trump campaign would not hesitate to do that despite Trump’s own laughably poor level of medical disclosure.
Before his heart attack, Sanders himself pledged to release medical records. “The American people have the right to know whether the person they’re going to be voting for for president is healthy,” he said. “And we will certainly release our medical records before the primaries.” After his heart attack, he pledged “full disclosure” to Sanjay Gupta, that he would make “all of our medical records public for you or anybody else who wants to see them.” Sanders has gone on to release fairly detailed letters from three physicians, but that is not the general meaning of “all of our medical records.”
In this race, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released not only a doctor’s letter but five pages of supporting documentation. And it’s worth noting that, in 2008, as he sought to become the oldest ever first-term president, at 71, Sen. John McCain allowed reporters to look at eight years of medical records. A candidate who literally had a heart attack while campaigning cannot reasonably be outraged at calls to meet levels of disclosure met previously by other candidates. And since Gray brought Bloomberg into this, it’s likely that he and his billions will get into the act in a way that could go nuclear.