An Unplanned Absence for Hillary Clinton at an Inopportune Time

Hillary Clinton in White Plains last week with her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, left, and her longtime aide Huma Abedin, right. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

For much of the summer, Hillary Clinton deliberately kept a low public profile, fund-raising in private and pursuing a hands-off campaign strategy: If Donald J. Trump wanted to seize center stage by picking unpopular fights — with a Gold Star father, a federal judge, the leaders of his own party — then he was welcome to.

Now, sidelined with pneumonia just as she hoped to reintroduce herself with a series of more personal policy speeches, Mrs. Clinton has left herself uniquely vulnerable to an unplanned absence.

Her dismal public standing on questions of candor, combined with decades of conspiracy theories about her health, had already produced an uncommon challenge for aides and supporters seeking to tamp down speculation about her physical condition.

More substantively, among Democrats worried that Mrs. Clinton has failed to make a more forceful case for her candidacy since the party’s convention, her illness has reinforced the danger of a Trump-centric strategy — leaving the Clinton side without a memorable affirmative message to hammer home, especially when its chief messenger is on the mend.

The focus on Mr. Trump has done little to remedy Mrs. Clinton’s trust deficit with voters. And despite volumes of policy proposals, even Clinton supporters often strain to identify cohesive themes, independent of Mr. Trump, in her campaign.

Aides said last week that she planned to deliver several speeches aimed at connecting her personal motivations to her political agenda. The second in the series, slated for Tuesday, was postponed after she fell ill.

“They’ve clearly framed the race as a referendum on Donald Trump,” said Steve McMahon, a longtime Democratic strategist. “That does create a vacuum and a greater level of interest in things like this that, frankly, probably have no special significance.”

In recent days, with the election nearing its final stretch, Mrs. Clinton had shown signs of more openness after months of encouragement from advisers to hold more news conferences, sit for more interviews and brandish the dry charm they have encountered in private. Last week, she debuted a new campaign plane with room for reporters to fly with her and stood for extended questions from her traveling press corps, for the first time in several months, without major incident.

The campaign also introduced a new advertisement, a largely positive spot focused on Mrs. Clinton’s history of working with Republicans. She is seated, speaking directly to the camera, evoking a biographical video from the Democratic National Convention in July that highlighted her career accomplishments and compassion.

“They’re going back to that part of the convention that got lost in the month of August,” said Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic adviser and strategist.

Brian Fallon, a campaign spokesman, said that Mrs. Clinton would continue her speech tour once she returned to full health, with addresses focused on “an inclusive economy,” “a call to national service” and “a vision for how we should prioritize the condition of kids and families.”

“We’re going to pick up right where we left off in terms of sparking a conversation about her aspirational vision for the country,” Mr. Fallon said in an interview. “I think that that will be far more enduring in the course of this campaign than this brief focus on this case of pneumonia.”

But the diagnosis has proved particularly ill timed, not least because of recent ominous insinuations from Republicans, including Mr. Trump, that Mrs. Clinton’s health was faltering.

In the past, she has tried to deflect questions with humor, opening a jar of pickles to demonstrate her vitality on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” last month and asking the host to take her pulse. This time, there has been no such attempt at levity.

Her campaign’s handling of the episode has also exacerbated an impression that she is overly guarded, a trait that Clinton allies have long attributed to an endless feedback loop: She retreats to secrecy because she distrusts the news media, they say, creating a sense that there is something to hide, which makes reporters more wary.

“The past impressions of Hillary Clinton help fuel the questions about being transparent about her health,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic operative who helped steer campaigns for Howard Dean and Richard A. Gephardt, among others. “No one would have asked them of Dick Gephardt.”

Still, in this particular instance, Mrs. Clinton’s team has acknowledged some regrets. After she abruptly left a ceremony for the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, her campaign did not disclose her whereabouts for over an hour.

Several hours later, aides announced that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia — two days earlier.

On Monday, staff members were determined to take the blame for the secrecy and to shield Mrs. Clinton from the criticism.

“We could have done better,” Jennifer Palmieri, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, wrote on Twitter.

“That’s on the staff,” Mr. Fallon told MSNBC.

“That’s on us,” Robby Mook, her campaign manager, later told the network.

Mr. Mook was referring to the gap between Mrs. Clinton’s departure from the memorial and the campaign’s announcement of what had happened. Some supporters, though, suggested that even more disclosure was necessary.

“I would have, on the initial diagnosis, made that public,” said Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania. “They’re probably a little bit gun-shy.”

Mr. Fallon said there was never “an intent to conceal the diagnosis” and speculated that Mrs. Clinton might have told the traveling press corps about it on her own this week, had she not become overheated at the memorial on Sunday and changed her travel schedule.

Mr. Rendell echoed several other Democrats who predicted that the episode would be largely forgotten if Mrs. Clinton returned to the campaign trail soon, especially if she delivers a commanding performance at the first presidential debate in two weeks.

But after a trying summer for Mr. Trump, during which he seemed to set off controversy almost daily, he has displayed something approaching self-discipline in recent days. He has often focused on Mrs. Clinton’s remark at a fund-raiser last week that half of his supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.”

The events over the weekend only heightened Democrats’ anxiety about a race some had thought would effectively be over by now, given Mr. Trump’s historic unfavorable ratings and the Democrats’ built-in advantages on the electoral map.

Dan Pfeiffer, a former top adviser to President Obama, preached calm. He said that while “the last couple of days could have gone better,” the main cost to the Clinton campaign had been “playing defense instead of offense” while parrying questions about her health.

“That is less of a problem because she is winning,” Mr. Pfeiffer said, citing Mrs. Clinton’s continued advantage in polls, though some have shown a tightening race. “Every day the race doesn’t move is a win for her. Trump can’t afford to trade baskets at this point.”

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By MATT FLEGENHEIMER SEPT. 13, 2016

The New York Times

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