If you are ever publicly felled by a mystery illness, leading the public to openly question your overall health as well as your fitness to withstand at least four years of a Presidential term, don’t send Bill Clinton out to do your crisis public relations.
Because Bill Clinton will only make things worse.
The Clinton campaign has activated Bill to stand in for Hillary at several upcoming events, including a Hollywood fundraiser. But they’ve also sent him on several major political television programs to help smooth over the public’s concern and better define the Hillary’s pneumonia timeline.
He told CBS News‘ Charlie Rose that pneumonia was just running rampant through Clinton campaign headquarters and it was merely a matter of time before Hillary passed out on camera.
That appears to contradict an assurance from Hillary Clinton’s doctor on Sunday that the Democratic presidential candidate wasn’t contagious and hadn’t been spreading the disease while meeting with Barbra Streisand, holding children for photo opportunities, and addressing large groups of people.
How did Bill explain the dissonance? He said the respiratory illness taking down Clinton campaign workers was a contagious form of pneumonia. So it spread like wildfire through the campaign offices, but not through campaign events.
We’re not medical experts, but Clinton’s form of pneumonia either has to be contagious or not, it can’t be both.
In reality (or at least according to the Internet), pneumonia is fairly difficult to catch from another person, so neither Bill Clinton nor Hillary Clinton’s campaign team are likely telling the whole truth.
Fortunately, Bill Clinton made a vain attempt to clarify his statement.
“Well if it is, it’s a mystery to me and all of her doctors,” Clinton told Charlie Rose, “because frequently—well not frequently, rarely—but on more than one occasion, over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing happened to her when she got severely dehydrated.”
Which is it, frequently or rarely? It turns out, Camp Clinton wasn’t willing to clarify. When the interview aired a second time, later in the day, the phrase had been edited out.
This isn’t the first time Bill Clinton has made Hillary’s health a confusing issue for voters. In May, during a speech at the Peterson Foundation, he upended a State Department timeline for Hillary’s 2012 concussion, which she sustained after passing out from dehydration following a stomach virus. She was hospitalized, subsequently, with a blood clot.
According to State Department spokespeople, Hillary was rested and recovered completely from her injuries within a month. According to Bill Clinton, the timeline for recovery was more like six months—and it took “six months of very serious work” for Clinton to bounce back.
It is, of course, not clear whether Bill would know much of anything about Hillary’s overall health anyway. According to recently released schedules and the flood of emails made public by the State Department, Hillary relies on her closest advisers, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to personally care for her. As Secretary of State, Hillary saw Bill infrequently, and they lived, most of the time, in separate cities.
