Standing together: Hillary and Chelsea Clinton
Posted on 01/27/2007 5:50:27 PM PST by bruinbirdman
When her father Bill ran for the presidency in 1992, Chelsea Clinton was a gawky 12-year-old with braces and a mop of crinkly hair, ill at ease in front of the cameras.
Some 15 years later, her mother Hillary has assigned her daughter a crucial role in the family's latest White House campaign as the former First Lady hopes to firm up support among women voters with a "mum strategy".
Standing together: Hillary and Chelsea Clinton
Miss Clinton, 26, who now works for a Wall Street hedge fund, has not appeared alongside her mother since the New York senator launched her presidential bid last weekend, but her impact on the campaign is already being felt.
Sen Clinton has begun repeatedly referring to herself as a mother, with the particular experience that entails, since declaring herself "in" for the presidential race last weekend. She has described her daughter and husband as her closest advisers.
It was a point she drove home yesterday when she launched her "ground war" in Iowa, the first state to hold a presidential caucus, where Sen Clinton, the Dem-o-crats' national frontrunner, is trailing both Barack Obama and John Edwards, her two main rivals.
She has also just released a new edition of It Takes a Village, her controversial 1996 book on bringing up children. "At the core of this book is my own experience as a mother and my conviction that parents are the most important influences on the lives of their children," she writes in a fresh introduction.
Sen Clinton, 59, has been working hard to shake off her reputation as a cold and calculating political operator and cultivate a more compassionate image. Her family is crucial to that strategy but brings troubling political baggage.
At the New York book launch last week for the memoirs of Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic fund-raiser who is chairman of Sen Clinton's campaign, Bill Clinton, the former president, described his excitement at his new "supporting role" in his wife's bid to return to the White House.
"I'll do whatever I'm asked to do," he told a gathering of "Clintonistas", to loud applause. "I'm very proud of my wife. So is her daughter."
But despite his enduring popularity, many Americans still associate him indelibly with his affair with Monica Lewinsky — a scandal that Sen Clinton's advisers know does her no favours with the electorate.
With his natural charm and charisma, he also tends to upstage his wife. By contrast, Chelsea Clinton, who watched quietly from the back of the room at the Four Seasons restaurant as her father enthused about her mother's prospects, is regarded by "Team Hillary" as a big weapon in her political arsenal.
They are expected to make a joint appearance soon and she will steadily assume a more prominent role as the battle for the Democratic nomination intensifies.
Miss Clinton is already a veteran of the often harsh world of presidential politics – which is probably why she has shown no interest in pursuing her parents' choice of career.
As a teenager growing up in the White House, her father's philandering brought forth a stream of media coverage, often with lurid detail of his sexual behaviour, and her mother was pilloried for her failed attempt to reform the US health system.
While her father was president, Miss Clinton was generally kept out of the glare of publicity as she attended Sidwell Friends School, an exclusive private academy in Washington. She later studied history at Stanford University and earned a master's degree in international relations at University College, Oxford.
Despite occasional appearances in the gossip columns, she has remained intensely private. While she will appear alongside her mother at selected campaign events, she is not expected to make policy statements; rather, the presence of an assured young career woman will demonstrate Sen Clinton's maternal skills.
Even here, there is potential embarrassment. Miss Clinton's boyfriend - and soon-to-be-husband, if the tabloids are to be believed - is Marc Mezvinsky, 29, a former intern in her father's White House who now works for Goldman Sachs.
His parents were also Democratic politicians and family friends of the Clintons, but Mr Mezvinsky's father Ed, a former congressman, is serving six years in jail for fraud offences he committed to recoup losses in a Nigerian scam.
Given that the Clintons were dogged by allegations of financial impropriety over the Whitewater land deal, it seems unlikely that Sen Clinton's foes will refrain from making capital of the fact that her daughter's prospective father-in-law is behind bars for fraud.
Sen Clinton's brother, Tony Rodham, also faces financial and legal trouble, accused of failing to repay $107,000 (£54,600) in loans from a carnival company whose owners received pardons from Mr Clinton when he was president.
Chelsea 2016!
You were thinking of James McDougal, the one time hubby of Susan. Webster is alive and well and ready to 'roll over again' again for the Klintons when and if Hillary gets the nomination.;
NO, no, we have to have a Bush or a Dole first in 2016 after a Klintoon. Bob Dole?
Thanks, Cat! I am truly sorry!
Did you see the recent SNL sketch called about an awards show called 'The Spammies'? The Nigerian Prince was up for an award. I think Kenan Thompson was playing the part.
"...no kid gloves for Chelsea anymore."
Uh, not so you'd notice. There is in the article a quick mention of Chelsea appearing in the gossip columns, as if it was gossip about her new hair-style.
The London tabloid pictures of Chelsea falling down drunk on the sidewalk outside of a London club and being poured into the backseat of a car, unconscious, her skirt riding up around her waist baring her buttocks to the camera never made it across the Pond. This was when she was "studying" at Oxford.
Last week a columnist on the NYPost's Page Six described a recent night out for Chelsea, who, incapacitated, had to be propped against a wall and held up by her fellow revelers.
This child has some serious problems if she is still doing this at age 26. A concerned "mom" would be aware of her child's self-destructive behavior and drop everything else to insure that it did not continue.
However, the media will ignore Chelsea's conduct so that Hilary can also ignore it. Yet the press never reports on the Bush twins jobs or vacations without introducing the story by recalling the twins using fake id's in a bar when they were 19.
If Chelsea does become engaged or marries, Pelosi's role as "America's grandmother" will be trumped by Hilary's as "America's mother-in-law"
Not if Chelsea's oft-noted resemblance to Webb Hubbell is more than coincidental.
Seeing those two reminds me of an old saying, "You can put lipstick on a pig and drive it downtown, but it's still a pig."
LibKill is a bit over the hill, but makes sense to me: the real question is how could Hillary fully recognize her daughter until she has slapped Bubba in the face?
MORGAN STEWART'S COMING HOME. There is a cut-out campaign picture of the politico hubby and wife with a space for son that says, "Put son here."
Funny isn't it? The Bush twins are such nice and wholesome young women with jobs that serve and Chelsea is (often) drunk. Yet to the MSM Chelsea is the good Presidential kid. The MSM priority of the Democrat Party or actually ANY Democrat Uber-alles is appalling.
Hey, nobody's perfect!
It's kind of annoying to see liberals pretending they are champions of family values.
I love that movie. It was a lot of fun. Especially the shower scene.
:-) Good...and false but accurate!
Good eye. I think just about every public picture of the two together (if there is one without Bill in it) is known. Note that it is Reuters. Note that there is no reference to location or occasion.
yitbos
If Hill and Bill were my folks and I knew the definition of Arkancide from the inside, I might turn into a drunk myself.
yitbos
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