DATE WITH DEATH

Democratic Campaign Consultant With Alzheimer’s Opts for Euthanasia

“What’s the point? You know, why sit around the house and watch a little piece of your brain disappear every day?” Hal Malchow said. He plans to die this week, on March 21.

A veteran Democratic campaign consultant who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019 will end his life through euthanasia in Switzerland this week, Politico reports. Direct mail pioneer Hal Malchow, 72, decided long ago, after learning he carried the genetic markers for the dementia that killed his mother, that he would take matters into his own hands before he was no longer able to. He decided to go overseas because any U.S. states that permit euthanasia require that the patient have only months left to live. “What’s the point? You know, why sit around the house and watch a little piece of your brain disappear every day?” Malchow told Politico. But before he set his date with death, March 21, Malchow had one last thing he wanted to do. The man who managed Al Gore’s successful Senate campaign recently published a new book, Reinventing Political Advertising, with hopes of convincing his fellow Democrats that they need a new approach to how to run campaigns. “Ninety percent of voters are choosing parties,” he wrote in the book. “Yet our approach to advertising has not changed at all. Almost 100 percent of our advertising dollars are spent on candidate choice. The decision driving 9 out of 10 votes is not being addressed at all.”