WASHINGTON -- Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Sunday that Hillary Rodham Clinton's health and age were fair targets for inquiry ahead of a possible 2016 presidential run.
Priebus and Karl Rove, the Republican strategist who injected those questions into the debate, suggested that such scrutiny might dissuade her from running.
Rove infuriated Democrats recently when he said that Clinton might have suffered a "traumatic brain injury" in a late 2012 fall in which she suffered a concussion. She was hospitalized for a few days for a blood clot, but she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have said that her recovery was complete.
Priebus, asked on the NBC program Meet the Press about whether he believed that lingering effects of the injury could impede Hillary Clinton's abilities to serve as president, replied: "I'm not a doctor. What I do know is that the issue is going to come up, as it does for any person running for president."
He added: "The issues that I talked about are going to be the issues that make her unacceptable" to voters, and he said he did not think she would run "if she has another month like she's just had."
Rove, whose original comment drew retorts from Democrats as an effort to undercut that party's presumed frontrunner for 2016, said Sunday that he was not questioning Clinton's health but "whether or not it's a done deal if she's running."
In a panel discussion on Fox News Sunday, he noted that Clinton would be 69 at the time of the 2016 election and 77 at the end of a possible second term.
"She would not be human if she did not take this into consideration," he said.
Should Clinton run and be elected, she would be about eight months younger than the oldest president, Ronald Reagan, when taking office.
Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who favors a Clinton presidential run, said Sunday on NBC that Rove was "struggling to stay relevant" but that "Karl Rove engaging in cheap shots is not going to frighten Hillary Clinton."
And Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who backed Clinton in her 2008 nomination contest against Barack Obama, dismissed Rove's comments as "pathetic."
"In my view, she's in the prime of her political life," Feinstein said, appearing on the CNN program State of the Union.
"She has got the energy," she said. "She's articulate. She's got the background. She's got the smarts. She has all of the elements of a good leader."
Feinstein said she had counseled Clinton against declaring her candidacy too early, given her high favorability ratings among Democrats, "because somebody would do the stupid things that Karl Rove has just done."
The senator dismissed Republican efforts to further investigate the deadly September 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, as "ridiculous."
Feinstein, who is chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, called the Republicans' push for a select congressional committee on Benghazi "a hunting mission for a lynch mob." All relevant questions had been answered in past inquiries, she said, including a review by her committee.
But former Vice President Dick Cheney was on the offensive Sunday about the Benghazi attacks.
He said Clinton bears responsibility for the attacks and will be held accountable should she run for president.
"It's a major issue," Cheney, who served under President George W. Bush, said in an interview on Fox News Sunday. "I don't think we've heard the last of it yet."
Clinton has said she'll make a decision on a 2016 White House run by the end of this year.
Information for this article was contributed by Alan Bjerga and Greg Giroux of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 05/19/2014