ELECTION day Nov. 8 is bearing down on US voters but it is arguable that their choice became even more unappetizing with the illness, apparently from pneumonia, of the 69 year-old Democrat party candidate Hillary Clinton.
Immediately before she collapsed at Sunday’s 9/11 fifteenth anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero, Clinton aides had been insisting their candidate was in fine health. A cough that had been dogging her recently, culminating in a coughing spasm on a campaign platform last week, was put down to allergic reactions. It now emerges that Clinton’s pneumonia was actually diagnosed two days before her collapse.
It is not simply questions about her health that will dog the closing stages of her campaign. Clinton’s trustworthiness among the electorate, already put at a low of 37 percent, is likely to face a further dive. The ironic likelihood is emerging is that if Clinton wins the White House it will not be because of many of her perceived virtues as a politician — these are precious few — but because the majority of voters are frankly terrified of what would happen if they hand the Oval office to Donald Trump.
The Donald, who is 70, has refused to hand over his medical records, publishing instead a specious note from one of his doctors pronouncing him sure to be "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency".
Such skating over any important details is typical of the bombastic Trump campaign, which has been notable for its viciousness, not simply toward Muslims and Hispanics. Trump has consistently claimed that Clinton is medically and mentally unfit to sustain the challenges of being president. It was characteristic of his mean-minded campaigning that he did not immediately take to Twitter, his preferred quick and easy channel for his latest pronouncements, to express any concern for his rival’s illness. Instead Trump aides began briefing that their man had been right all along about Clinton’s medical weaknesses.
Whatever it is doing for US voters, this unedifying presidential campaign is a cause of rising concern among America’s overseas friends. If Trump wins, US foreign and economic policy could be turned on its head, as he pursues an isolationist agenda that seeks to reverse the very real gains of globalization. If Clinton triumphs, US Middle East foreign policy is likely to solidify around her past slavish backing for Zionist hawks in Israel, while pursuing the same muddled interventionist and non-interventionist stands that marked her time as President Obama’s first Secretary of State. The monuments to this include the enduring bloody tragedy of Syria, the wreckage of Libya, which now stands on the brink of outright civil war and the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israel government-backed Zionist settlers.
The only thing that can be said for both Clinton and Trump, and it is not much, is that their lackluster campaigns look dazzling when compared to that of the third candidate, the Libertarian party’s Gary Johnson, who asked during a TV interview last week “What is Aleppo?” That such an ill-informed clown could even think of running for the world’s most powerful office says a lot about the US political system which throws up a bipolar Congress repeatedly prepared to run the country into bankruptcy and two mainstream presidential candidates neither of whom strikes the majority of observers as remotely fit for high office.
