As Hillary Clinton recuperates from pneumonia, President Barack Obama and her husband Bill Clinton will be hitting the campaign trail for her to make sure that she does not lose the momentum she is thought to be still having overall, notably in key battleground States.
Obama’s will be a one-off event for now as he travels Tuesday afternoon to Philadelphia for a pre-scheduled rally, while Bill Clinton will be off to California to take his wife’s place at two star-studded fundraisers in Beverly Hills and then proceed to Nevada for a campaign event.
The White House said Obama will make a forceful case to voters on “how important it is for him to be succeeded by somebody who is committed to the same kind of vision for the country that he has been fighting for”. It will be Obama’s first campaign event for her, with more expected follow in the coming weeks.
Although Republicans have sought to deride Clinton’s bid as ‘status quoist’ that could turn out to be “a third Obama term” as against ‘change’ represented by Donald Trump, Democrats believe Obama’s high job approval ratings (58 per cent according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll) will be a huge asset for Clinton in the remaining eight weeks of the campaign.
Downplaying concerns about Clinton’s health, White House spokesman Josh Earnest spoke of the manner in which she ran a gruelling schedule as Secretary of State, adding: “It certainly does not impact his (Obama’s) assessment that she is the best person in the country to succeed him in the Oval Office.”
Clinton herself tweeted from her home in Chappaqua, New York that she was “feeling fine and getting better”, adding: “like anyone who’s ever been home sick from work, I’m just anxious to get back out there.”
As questions continued to swirl over her state of health and the secrecy that was maintained over her pneumonia diagnosis until the Sunday morning episode near the 9/11 memorial, the Clinton campaign asserted she has “no other undisclosed condition” with plans to release additional medical information in the next couple of days “to further put to rest any lingering concerns”.
In a telephone interview to CNN, Clinton said she has “met a high standard of transparency” about her health, whereas very little was known about her Republican opponent. As for her campaign’s silence about her pneumonia affliction, she said she didn’t think it was “going to be that big a deal”.
Virtually chiding sections of media that keep pressing her to disclose more, Clinton commented: “Compare everything you know about me with my opponent. I think it’s time he met the same level of disclosure that I have for years….It’s really past time for him to be held to the same standards, not just as me, but as anybody else who has sought this job.”
With Clinton confined to her home, Trump went all out to launch a blistering attack against her over her recent comment, dismissing “half” of his supporters as a “basket of deplorables”, comprising people who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic”.
Disregarding the qualified regrets that she offered subsequently, Trump demanded a full retraction, insisting her comment “disqualifies” her from being president. He raised the issue prominently at his campaign events in Baltimore and Asheville, North Carolina.