Maybe Steve Forbes had a colonoscopy recently, and perhaps Bill Bradley gave a charitable donation to the World Wildlife Fund in 1978. It's very possible that all the presidential candidates are judged by their family physicians to be in excellent physical and mental health. What does that tell the public? That it's unlikely George W. Bush will keel over during his term? That Al and Tipper Gore are, according to a private analyst, "happily married"?
These days, because the public is largely convinced that complete disclosure somehow precludes any nasty surprises down the road, we want desperately to believe that we can know everything about the people who are running for president. And we've also convinced ourselves that it's our indisputable right to uncover as much as we can. And in the current, vaguely McCarthy-esque era of the public "right to know," we can rest assured that someone like FDR — whose physical health was in sharp decline and whose marriage was tortured — will probably never again make it past the New Hampshire primaries.