Posted on 01/28/2007 2:56:39 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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".
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 arsen-al.
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.
"She later studied history at Stanford University and earned a master's degree in international relations at University College, Oxford."
"Miss Clinton, 26, who now works for a Wall Street hedge fund..."
How does one parlay history and international relations into a job on Wall Street? I suppose the international relations could be used somehow, but, in general WTF?
I'm already sick of the Hill/Bill/Chelsea road show. No, 'sick' doesn't begin to describe the degree of nausea.
For those of you who want to know what kind of idiot would fall for those Nigerian e-mail scams. Well, now you know.
How can someone who looks like they could eat an ear of corn through a picket fence, possibly help Hitlery?
After all, Mommy turned $1,000 into $100,000 in 10 months just by picking up tips reading the Wall Street Journal and outsmarting the oil futures commodities traders! It runs in the family!
An odd thing to say - why not "our" daughter????????
"Put down the ashtray and step away from the lamp..."
Chelsea is a whole lot better looking now than when she was in the White House :/
Everyone gets to have their own vision of "Better Looking". I think she still looks like a "beached carp".
Yep, this picture confirms my comparison of Chelsea to a "Beached Carp".
Does the updated version of "It Takes A Village" give credit to the surgeon who has worked on Chelsea? She hardly looks like the same girl.
Well, I'm bored by her, so that should read "1".
What's up with the Clintoon's 'hooking up' with people who have the last name "...insky"??
Curious minds...........
Think Web Hubbell.........and the fact that Clinton made the admission to a couple of women that he was "sterile".
Talk about cold and calculating. Chelsea works for a hedge fund. The basic tool of a hedge fund is to sell stocks short. I dare say that the average hedge fund did quite well, relative to the market in the period of September 12- December 30 2001. What is bad for the American economy is good for a edge fund.
The Democrats are on the precipice of orchestrating another recession, on which they will blame the Republicans. What is bad for America is good for Democrats.
In this coming recession, the hedge funds will do quite well.
Mother and daughter have the same creepy bug eyed stare.
Another plus for the Webb Theory of paternity.
Typical Democrat money management.
Because Webb Hubbel is the father of Chelsea. Everybody knows that.
In a book written before the court case in which Robert Torricelli was allowed, after the deadline, to withdraw as the 2002 NJ Democratic senate candidate and have Lautenberg's name substituted for his on the ballot, Ann Coulter noted that New Jersey's supreme court was the worst in the nation "against some stiff competition." And that case certainly illustrated that fact. The reason it was so egregious is that the court held that the Democratic Party had a right to have a candidate with a chance to win. Whereas by nominating a crook, the Democratic Party of New Jersey - and all its politicians who did not oppose the renomination of Torricelli, richly deserved defeat if the voters of NJ so dictated.If by some long shot Hillary is not the nominee, the worst thing I think it likely to be able to say about the winner is that in the primary he did not talk about the radical corruption of the WH in the 1990s.
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