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 old at the time of her inauguration as the nation’s first woman president on Jan. 20, 2017. This would make her the second-oldest person ever installed into a first term in the nation’s highest office, after President Ronald Reagan, who was 69 years and 349 days old when sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Reagan is widely considered one of history’s greatest leaders. But behind the scenes, some doubted his fitness.
Reagan’s son Ron wrote in his 2011 memoir, “My Father at 100,” that he saw signs of mental confusion from Alzheimer’s 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 Alzheimer’s.
This brings up two names: Hillary Clinton. And Karl Rove.
The Republican strategist dubbed “Bush’s 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, she’ll 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, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that,” Rove was quoted as saying in a May 12 piece by Emily Smith of The Post’s Page Six, headlined “Karl Rove: Hillary may have brain damage.”
A day after the story broke, as a rep for Clinton howled that Rove was “flat-out lying,” Rove backed off. Sort of. “No, no — I didn’t say she had brain damage. I said she had a serious health episode,” he said on Fox News Channel. “This will be an issue in the 2016 race, whether she likes it or not.”
Rove’s greatest dirty tricks allegedly include his spreading the notion that Bush’s foe in the 2000 GOP primary race, Sen. John McCain, had fathered an illegitimate African-American child — he and his wife actually adopted a girl from Bangladesh — and that he was mentally unstable as a result of being held prisoner in Vietnam. Bush won. (Rove denies any involvement in the smear campaign.)
But if Rove’s intention was to make people question Clinton’s soundness of mind and body, the ploy worked. The Washington Post published a story headlined, “Will Hillary Clinton’s health and age be an issue in 2016?”
Originally, some Republicans theorized Clinton invented the accident to avoid testifying before congressional committees about her handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks at US compounds in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. Soon, she may testify before a new House select committee investigating the slaughter. This time, her every word will be scrutinized for signs of illness.
She’s also been criticized lately over reports that she refused to put the al Qaeda-linked Boko Haram group on the US list of international terrorist organizations in 2011 and ’12. Instead, she put three Boko Haram leaders on the list in 2012. Of course, Boko Haram went on to kidnap 276 Nigerian schoolgirls last month. Her successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, put the tyrants on the list in 2013.
Could Clinton have stopped the monsters? We’ll never know.
Is Hillary Clinton sharp as cheddar, or afflicted with a series of senior moments? The world is watching.
It’s getting ruff at the times
Becoming the top editor of the Times was “like ascending to Valhalla.’’
“In my house growing up, the Times substituted for religion. If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”
That’s Jill Abramson as quoted on the Times’ website the day she was appointed the newspaper’s first female executive editor in 2011. The “Valhalla’’ quote stuck. But the blasphemous message that followed was excised from the Web later that day and did not appear in the next day’s print editions.
Now that Abramson, 60, has been given the heave-ho, there’s no one to save her from herself. Her words have reappeared online in a brief story about her rise and fall.
And the battle continues. On Sunday — a day after publisher Arthur “Pinch’’ Sulzberger Jr. issued a second statement, implying Abramson did not play well with others — her daughter Cornelia Griggs fired off another volley on Instagram, portraying Mom as all sweetness and light, with a puppy, no less. The shock had barely subsided from Abramson’s abrupt firing, of course, when Griggs’ first post showed her in boxing gear, going down fighting.
Let’s hope faith and civility return to The Paper of Record.
Hater hack
Cabby Gabriel Diaz, 27, of The Bronx is a self-described National Socialist — a Nazi. The Taxi & Limousine Commission suspended his hack license for 30 days after folks complained to the Anti-Defamation League that the nutcase drove through city streets wearing a red band on his left arm emblazoned with a swastika. Has the TLC violated Diaz’s constitutional right to free expression, as he claims?
Don’t ride with this moron! Punishing Diaz only makes him a martyr for hate.
Cougars’ No. 1 cub
Vito Schnabel, the 27-year-old art-dealer son of artist and film director Julian Schnabel, frolicked with a topless, 40-year-old “Project Runway’’ host Heidi Klum on a Mexican beach, The Post’s Kirsten Fleming reported. Schnabel has dated American actresses Demi Moore and Liv Tyler. Moore was 50, Schnabel 26, and Tyler was 32 to his 23. Australian-born supermodel Elle Macpherson hung out with Schnabel at the mature age of 44. Schnabel was 21.
Call the ladies cougars if you will. Schnabel has hit on a genius romantic strategy.