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.
Welllllllllllllllll,
your unroyal lowenss; your hideous heinous . . .
word has leaked out that your only offspring may love you as her mom
but
SHE REALLY DISLIKES YOU AS A PERSON.
Not surprising given how close she's had to live around you.
You could save the country a lot of pain by bowing out of public life before the rest of the country realizes what an evil globalist traitor Marxist Machiavellian Fosterizing excuse for an American that you really are.
Why does it look like Hilary peed on herself?
What a transparently evil predator she is. God help us if she becomes President.
So I guess it's no longer "Hands off Chelsea" for the MSM anymore?
It's hard to say. I picked a photo of Chelsea before she had any work done. I can definitely see Hillary in her but no Bill. He may be infertile like he says to his conquests, willing or not. If they decided to pick a sperm donor from Hillary's coworkers at the time, why didn't they go with Vince?
Still using her as a photop, how sad is that? Still going after the Sucker Moms.
Pray for W and Our Troops
You're thinkng of jim McDougal.
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