EDITORIAL: A bad weekend

Not a great past few days for Hillary Clinton.

The Democratic presidential nominee not only stepped into her own verbal refuse over the weekend, she almost took a header into it, too.

On Friday, Mrs. Clinton revealed to a group of donors her assessment of those who favor her Republican opponent. “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”

Four years ago, GOP nominee Mitt Romney faced howls of protest from Barack Obama and his media stenographers when he uttered his statement about the “47 percent” of Americans who pay no income tax. His campaign suffered.

But while Mr. Romney sought only to highlight the pitfalls of government dependency — and, in fact, embraced policies of economic liberty for Americans across the board — Mrs. Clinton’s comments reveal the patronizing disdain with which Democrat elites view this country’s working men and women living in “fly-over country.”

You know, those hayseeds and toe-wigglers out there “clinging to their guns and religion,” as another famous Democrat once sneeringly observed. The ones in desperate need of the paternalistic Nanny State envisioned by progressives that will shackle them to handouts while mandating that they learn to think and behave to the satisfaction of sophisticates in Manhattan and Berkeley.

Mrs. Clinton quickly backtracked, saying she regretted describing a large part of the electorate in such condescending terms. But, in fact, it was a rare moment of truth for a woman who has spent the past few months lying about her emails and dragging around a scandal-filled dust devil in her wake.

But there’s more. As the Clinton camp worked to defuse blowback from their candidate’s impertinent remarks, another potential distraction surfaced. Video of Mrs. Clinton caught her almost collapsing after she left a 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York City on Sunday.

This comes as the right-wing blogosphere is awash in rumor and speculation about the state of Hillary Clinton’s health.

The nominee’s doctor quickly issued a written statement explaining that Mrs. Clinton had been diagnosed with pneumonia a few days earlier. He attributed her wobbliness to dehydration and the heat.

But the incident renewed calls for both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump to release their health records, much as John McCain did in 2008 to ensure voters that he had no lingering issues associated with his previous battle with skin cancer.

All this is rather ironic, given that Democrats have hammered away at Mr. Trump for failing to make public his tax returns, an issue he should have defused months ago. Now, however, expect Mr. Trump to turn the tables if the Clinton camp resists calls to reveal the 68-year-old candidate’s medical history.