What about Bernie Sanders’ heart attack? At 78, he says you know enough
According to most news coverage, self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is doing rather well in his second quest for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, to which he does not belong.
But quietly, amid all the attempted primary vote-counting, the nationally-televised debating and the political charges flying back and forth, Sanders just made a confession unintentionally. Under polite but firm questioning from NBC’s Chuck Todd, Sanders admitted he’s broken a promise to release his full medical records. But he claims on the basis of no authority whatsoever that’s OK.
Last fall, you may recall, Sanders was stricken with a heart attack that knocked him out of campaigning. Taking the oath of office at 79, if successful, Sanders would be older than any other U.S. president, entering or leaving the White House. Today, he’s already 13 years past the average lifespan of a man born before Pearl Harbor in 1941.
“The American people,” Sanders said in September, “have the right to know whether the person they’re going to be voting for for president is healthy. And we will certainly release our medical records before the primaries. It will certainly be before the first votes are cast.”
Under pressure now that two states have voted, Sanders claims he has released as much medical information as other candidates. “But no other candidate has had a heart attack,” said Todd. “I mean,” Sanders said, “you can start releasing medical records, and it never ends.”
More accurately, it never used to end. There was a time in my professional memory when such a refusal by a candidate seeking to become commander in chief to release pertinent detailed medical data and provide a doctor to answer questions would dominate sustained news cycles until the politician caved to the pressure and complied.
Today, you may well have not even heard of Sanders’ admission to Todd. Just as we’ve never been given an adequate explanation for President Donald Trump’s unscheduled autumn visit to Walter Reed Medical Center, which you don’t hear about anymore.
Just as you don’t hear steady media demands anymore to breach Trump’s continued refusal to release his tax returns. He promised to put them out eventually more than three years ago. Still nothing yet. And the drumbeat of demands has disappeared, too.
Such successful stonewalling of media by presidents is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 2013, Barack Obama professed outrage at reports that the Internal Revenue Service had subjected conservative groups to more intensive scrutiny than others, delaying their tax-exempt applications sometimes for a year or two. Oh, and by the way, benefiting Obama’s reelection efforts. Investigations by the FBI and others were launched.
Nothing ever came of them.
A year earlier a mob of militants sacked and burned the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, killing the ambassador and three other Americans. Inexplicably, no rescue or relief effort was prepared or launched, and subsequent reports revealed security forces in that unstable country had actually been reduced, despite protests.
The next morning Obama, inexplicably absent throughout the crisis, briefly delayed a Las Vegas fundraising trip for a Rose Garden photo-op to express outrage and vow swift justice. A single conspirator was later captured.
An official government investigation failed even to interview Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on duty that night and found no one to blame for the deaths. The Republican House held extended hearings. Nothing real ever came of that, either.
In effect, there are now too often no consequences for such shady, even corrupt behavior. Which helps explain the 2016 election of an outsider promising profound change in the nation’s capital.
To my eyes, the reasons are evident. They include an institutional presidency collecting ever-more power regardless of party, while once vigilant media, now downsized, have lost much of their power and influence as a result of internal and external forces.
The frantic pace of today’s news cycles, like an industrial assembly line gone out of control, permits an absence of conscientious follow-ups and accountability.
The explosion of information sources on the internet has weakened once-monolithic media both financially and in terms of influence. The competition among alternate, sometimes reliable sources also catches and inflames perceived biases, feeding a latent distrust of elite media, largely concentrated in the East.
Trump and Sanders did not invent media distrust, which goes way back to the 19th-century era of political party newspapers. But both play off it for their own purposes, including a desire to weaken the impact of critical media reports on their political careers.
That is not good — indeed, it’s dangerous — for the crucial flow of trustworthy information and important traditional balancing of democratic checks and balances in our unruly society. But it works now. Which is why both Trump and Sanders will get away with their stonewalling this time. And likely much more long-term.
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "What about Bernie Sanders’ heart attack? At 78, he says you know enough."