BUFFALO, N.Y. – It wasn’t the vast right-wing conspiracy, just a nasty bug that knocked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for a loop.
Moments after disclosing that her stomach was acting up, the former first lady went down for the count Monday.
“I cannot continue,” she said after trying several times to carry on with a speech to a Buffalo-area women’s group. Aides jumped to her side as Clinton slumped into a chair.
“It was a very scary thing, particularly when all the Secret Service men rushed to her aid,” said Robert McCarthy, a reporter with The Buffalo News.
A doctor in the audience checked the senator, who refused to go to the hospital.
Clinton and dozens of her staffers apparently either caught a stomach virus or got food poisoning at a weekend retreat in Westchester County, N.Y.
“On the way home (Saturday) people on the bus were already getting sick,” said one staffer, who spent the night throwing up. The retreat at the Hilton in Rye was supposed to be a get-to-know-you event for Clinton’s Senate staff, including several new hires.
After suffering through an ugly weekend in and out of the bathroom, most of Clinton’s New York office called in sick Monday.
But the Democratic lawmaker, and possible 2008 presidential candidate, insisted on going ahead with her scheduled trip to Buffalo, where she had a busy day of interviews and speeches.
The big scare came at lunchtime when she got up to speak at Buffalo’s Saturn Club. Looking wan and drawn, Clinton abruptly turned silent, sat down and crumpled into her seat.
“She felt weak, needed to sit down and then fainted briefly,” said spokesman Philippe Reines, who was also hit by the stomach bug.
A spokesman for the Rye Hilton, where rooms rent for $219 a night, did not return a call for comment.
Erie County Democratic Party Chairman Leonard Lenihan said he knew even before the fainting incident that the tenacious junior senator wasn’t herself.
“It wasn’t Hillary as we know her,” Lenihan said. “She definitely wasn’t feeling real well.”
Clinton began talking about Social Security to a crowd of roughly 150, but stopped moments later and left the room, which was said to be unusually warm.
When she returned, she started back toward the podium, but was quickly surrounded by staffers and Secret Service agents as she blacked out.
When she came to, Clinton, 57, drank plenty of Gatorade and then insisted on continuing with her schedule, delivering a speech on health care at the Catholic Canisius College, where she was picketed by anti-abortion activists.
“It wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds,” Clinton told the crowd, insisting she just had a “24-hour virus.”
Right after the fainting episode, Clinton called her husband, former President Bill Clinton, at their home in Chappaqua and told him she was fine. The senator later flew to Washington, where they also have a house. The former president underwent quadruple-bypass surgery last September.
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