The first sign of trouble came on Friday night. While speaking at an LGBT fundraiser, Hillary Clinton bungled a line about Donald Trump’s supporters — and created the “basket of deplorables” gaffe. We know it was a gaffe because she had delivered the line previously in recorded interviews the way it was intended. But on Friday, her delivery wasn’t precise. The campaign spent much of Saturday cleaning it up.
Everybody knows that when a candidate commits a gaffe, 99% of the time it’s because of fatigue. A tired candidate is a bad candidate. It’s impossible to be sharp when you aren’t rested or when you aren’t feeling well.
By the time Clinton misspoke at that fundraiser, the senior staff already knew she had pneumonia. After all, they know her schedule, and they knew she had seen her doctor that day. While it’s possible that everyone didn’t know — it’s inconceivable that John Podesta and Huma Abedin (the campaign co-chairs) didn’t know that Hillary was ill. Campaign manager Robby Mook probably knew, too.
For reasons we may never know, they didn’t pull back on Hillary’s schedule. And from that moment on they were flirting with disaster. Disaster caught up with them Sunday morning at Ground Zero.
By Sunday morning, here’s what the senior staff knew: They knew that Hillary had pneumonia; they knew she was taking antibiotics; they knew she had a history of fainting spells; and they knew she’d be forced to stand for long periods in a crowd of people. Given this, why would they allow her to go down to Ground Zero for that memorial event? Based on the facts in front of them, a fainting spell was a predictable event. Had they thought just two steps ahead, they would have foreseen it, and pulled back.
The bottom line is that they allowed a 68-year-old woman with pneumonia to attend an uncontrolled public event outdoors.
Some might say that I’m misplacing blame, and that ultimately, Hillary made the decision to go to the event. There is no doubt in my mind that Hillary wanted to be there, and probably pressed the case to hold her schedule — for all the obvious reasons. But frankly, she should have been overruled.
With seven weeks to go, we can’t literally fire the staff. And to be fair, this same staff did an amazing job during the primary. But they truly did botch this weekend in a way that calls into question their ability to adopt to changing environments. While you can’t lose an election because of one fainting spell, you absolutely could lose an election over a series of perceived physical aliments. Now that Hillary has fainted on camera, she won’t be afforded any margin for error as far as her health is concerned. If she loses her balance even once more prior to election day, it’s an entire story.
The senior staff is quite good at spin. And their best option now is to spin themselves out of trouble — and hope that their two years of hard work wasn’t in vain.
UPDATE: After reading the first wave of comments, I removed the image that I originally chose for this post. Also, though I’ve already been labeled a “concern troll,” I’m actually simply offering my view on how our staff dropped the ball. Sorry that my viewpoint isn’t 100% the same as everyone else. God forbid!