Is Hillary Rodham Clinton up to snuff? Is the former first lady, who served as a US senator and as secretary of state, fierce, feisty and fabulous? Or is Clinton, 66, a doddering, expectant granny better suited to knitting booties for her preggers daughter, Chelsea, than running the country and leading the free world?
Can she defeat global villains while chasing after her intern-loving husband, Bill Clinton, 67, with whom she may or may not have lived for years?
If Hillary Clinton runs for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, which everyone save for a few Congolese Pygmies expects, then wins the general election, she would be 69 years and 86 days at the time of her inauguration as the nations first woman president on Jan. 20, 2017. This would make her the second-oldest person ever installed into a first term in the nations highest office, after President Ronald Reagan, who was 69 years and 349 days when sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Reagan is widely considered to be one of historys greatest leaders. But behind the scenes, some doubted his fitness.
Reagans son Ron wrote in a his 2011 memoir, My Father at 100, that he saw signs of mental confusion from Alzheimers disease in his dad as far back as the 1984 debate with Democratic presidential challenger Walter Mondale, when Reagan was 73 and Mondale 56. My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered, Ron Reagan wrote. His father sailed to re-election anyway, and died in 2004, at 93, from pneumonia complicated by Alzheimers.
This brings up two names: Hillary Clinton. And Karl Rove.
The Republican strategist dubbed Bushs Brain, Rove, 63, served as senior adviser to President George W. Bush from 2000 until 2007, and as his deputy chief of staff from 2004 to 2007. At a May 8 conference near Los Angeles, Rove said that if Hillary Clinton runs for president, shell have to tell voters what happened when she suffered a mysterious fall at home in December 2012 while secretary of state.
At the time, a brief statement issued by the State Department announced that Clinton, dehydrated from a stomach virus, fainted, hit her head and suffered a concussion.
Thirty days in the hospital? said Rove. She spent three days in the hospital.
And when she reappears, shes wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know whats up with that, Rove was quoted as saying in a May 12 piece by Emily Smith of The Posts Page Six, headlined Karl Rove: Hillary may have brain damage.
See original here:
Hillary Clinton will face questions on her age