The battle for the Democratic presidential nomination was in full swing in New
Hampshire earlier this year when Chelsea Clinton began to branch out on her
own as an eye-catching cheerleader for her mother’s campaign.
Arriving at a meeting in Manchester in January, Chelsea was greeted by a
gaggle of Hillary Clinton supporters who were patently overawed by the
smiling young woman who was shaking hands and autographing leaflets.
“Hey, Hillary, how do you like campaign-ing?” shouted one excited supporter,
muddling the daughter with her mother. The younger Clinton paused, and gave
a quiet smile. “I’m Chelsea,” she said, and everyone giggled.
It was a mistake that in one sense was easy to understand. Most Americans
remember Chelsea Clinton as an awkward adolescent in braces who was a
retiring, near-mute first daughter during Bill Clinton’s White House years.
Yet the Chelsea who has been shaking up her mother’s campaign could scarcely
be further removed from the gawky teen-ager who was once viciously derided
by Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio rabble-rouser, as the “White House
dog”.
At campaign meetings on university campuses across the country, student
audiences have been gasping at the confident, articulate, personable
spokeswoman who has been singing her mother’s praises in more than 20 states.
“Yeah,” wrote a student blogger in South Carolina after Chelsea appeared at
his college. “Intelligent, nice voice, sexy. She’s really blossomed into a
hot woman.”
In a presidential campaign filled with surprises, Chelsea Clinton has sprung
one of the most intriguing. She has emerged from the shadow of her famous
parents to carve out her own political identity as both a devoted and
persuasive surrogate for her mother; and – just maybe – as a dynasty’s next
best hope.
At primaries in Texas and Ohio this week, Hillary Clinton faces what may prove
her final chance to dislodge Barack Obama from Democratic favour and revive
Bill Clinton’s slumping hopes of returning to the White House as first
laddie.
Yet what if Hillary fails? Will that be the end of the Clinton family’s
remarkable presidential run? Or is America about to discover that a younger,
prettier but potentially just as formidable Clinton is ready to pick up the
baton?
She turned 28 last week and won’t be eligible to run for the White House until
she’s 35. Yet despite anything you may have heard about Americans being sick
of family dynasties, there are plenty of Democrats who are already
fantasising about President Chelsea Clinton – and her delighted parents are
doing nothing to discourage the idea.
“She has a wonderful wholeness about her,” Bill told the Los Angeles Times
last month. “I have to hold myself back so I don’t sound like a babbling
idiot. I’m just so proud of her. She’s turned out to be a wonderful human
being.”
Hillary is equally thrilled to have found the ideal riposte for those who
continually deride her as a calculating political machine. Hillary is a
mother, too, and given all we know about Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky
and the long and sordid roll call of explosive Clintonian romantic upsets,
it’s no small achievement that her only child has turned out so loyal and
seemingly normal.
“She’s my greatest source of support next to my husband,” says Hillary. “She’s
incredibly smart, got great people skills . . . and lots of good feedback.”
It’s all in her genes, of course. Chelsea Clinton was just six years old when
her parents sat her down in Arkansas to prepare her for a life of cutthroat
political combat. Hillary later told Lloyd Grove, then a political reporter
for The Washington Post, that when Bill was running for reelection as
governor of Arkansas in 1986, the couple wanted Chelsea to be aware that
nasty things might be said about her dad.
“Her eyes got real big, and she said, ‘Like what?’” added Hillary. “I said . .
. ‘Somebody running against your daddy will stand up and say, “Bill Clinton
has done a terrible job . . . he’s a bad person”.’ Her eyes just got huge.”
Five years later, things got even nastier when Flowers claimed to have had an
affair with Bill and sold her story to a tabloid. According to one of her
biographers, Hillary marched Chelsea to the nearest supermarket, pointed out
the tabloids and warned her that they would soon be writing bad stories
about her father. Chelsea has never publicly discussed what must have been a
mortifying experience for an 11-year-old girl.
As the Clintons prepared to move into the White House in 1992, Hillary paid an
early visit to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the former first lady who was
widely admired for shielding her children from an intrusive presidential
press corps. Her advice to Hillary was: “Be ruthless about keeping the
public from the private.”
That was no easy task in a household that became the most minutely scrutinised
in presidential history. Yet Chelsea was mostly left alone by the media as
her parents staggered towards the ultimate disaster of the Lewinsky affair,
the semen-stained dress and oral sex under the Oval Office table.
By then, Chelsea had escaped the fish-bowl of Washington DC and was studying
at Stanford University in California. She was doing her best to live a
normal life – not easy when you’ve got a Secret Service agent accompanying
you on your dates – when the country became convulsed in the Lewinsky
scandal.
One of the most memorable images from that period shows the Clintons departing
for a tortured weekend at Martha’s Vineyard soon after the sordid
revelations appeared. The camera captured Bill and Hillary walking with
Chelsea between them. The daughter is grasping both her parents’ hands,
seemingly determined to keep them together.
“Another person might have gone through the same thing and come out
extraordinarily bitter,” says Paul Begala, a former Clinton aide. He told
New York magazine: “Does Chelsea strike you as a woman who got bitter, or
got better?”
Chelsea wrote her Stanford thesis on the Northern Ireland peace process, a
subject close to her father’s heart. It came as no surprise that she should
then decide to follow in her dad’s footsteps to Oxford, where Bill had been
a Rhodes scholar.
It was in England that Chelsea, appropriately enough, flowered. She discovered
a good side to being a celebrity – she got to party with Madonna and Gwyneth
Pal-trow, she found a boyfriend and snogged him in public.
In October 2002 the British tabloids suddenly discovered that Chelsea had
become a woman. “Who’d have thought that goofy little Chelsea Clinton would
grow up to be a bit of a sex bomb?” mused the Daily Star at the time. The
Sun dubbed her “Hill’s angel”.
Chelsea reportedly lavished hundreds of pounds on a fashionable Japanese “hair
restructuring” technique that straightened her unruly mop. She became
friendly with Donatella Versace, the Italian fashion designer.
Geordie Greig, editor of Tatler, declared Chelsea a “trophy guest” who had
become “one of the most overinvited people today”. A few years later she had
become such a prize that a Kenyan man named Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgor wrote
to Bill Clinton offering him 40 goats and 20 cows for his daughter’s hand in
marriage.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Chelsea hinted in an article
published by Tina Brown’s now-defunct Talk magazine that she might follow
her parents into some kind of government service. She wrote that she felt “a
new urgency to play a part in America’s future”.
Yet when she returned to New York with her then boyfriend, Ian Klaus, she
plumped for filthy lucre. She joined McKin-sey & Co, the management
consultancy, at a reported starting salary of $120,000 a year. In 2006 she
jumped ship for a Wall Street hedge fund, where bonuses can run into
millions.
Klaus dropped out along the way, and Chelsea is currently linked romantically
to Marc Mezvinsky, a wealthy Goldman Sachs banker whose parents were both
elected to Congress, only to become immersed in scandal. Mezvinsky’s father
is in jail after pleading guilty to fraud.
As recently as last summer, Hillary Clinton’s aides were resolutely deflecting
suggestions that Chelsea might join her mother’s campaign. Howard Wolfson,
Hillary’s spokesman, insisted in August that Chelsea would “continue to
focus on her own professional and personal interests as a private person”.
Yet Obama’s relentless rise in opinion polls late last year forced a change in
calculations. It quickly became clear to the Clinton campaign that they
badly needed some youth and glamour to counter the African-American
senator’s heady advance among younger voters captivated by his promises of
Kennedyesque change.
Chelsea took a leave of absence from her hedge fund money-making, and stepped
into the campaign breach, much to the delight of student feminists and other
young Hillary supporters who had begun to fear their dream of a first woman
president was slipping away.
She survived a bumpy start. When Chelsea surfaced in Iowa and New Hampshire
late last year, not all the reviews were favourable. She was ridiculed after
one stop in Cedar Rapids, where she refused to answer questions from a “kid
reporter” for a school newspaper.
“I’m sorry, I don’t talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately,”
Chelsea told Sydney Rieckhoff, 9. She seems to have inherited her mother’s
rabid suspicion of the media, and continues to be shielded by an aggressive
coterie of Clinton aides who pounce on the slightest impertinence.
When one US television reporter unwisely suggested on air that Chelsea was
being “pimped out” by her parents, the campaign feigned outrage at his
choice of words, the reporter was suspended, and for a moment it seemed
Chelsea was 13 again, being protected by her parents from insolent hacks.
Yet these have proved minor blips, and it swiftly became clear she was
striking a chord at the college campuses she visited. It may be too late to
save her mother, but Chelsea’s success of the past few weeks has made one
thing clear: the dynasty is not yet dead.
In mid-February she arrived at the University of Wisconsin, where she was
introduced with daunting hyperbole to a hall full of students as “a
successful, brilliant young woman and a role model for all of us”.
Picking up a microphone, she modestly deflected the praise, and answered
questions for half an hour or so with a natural poise and warmth that had
none of her mother’s occasional shrillness and a great deal of her father’s
charm.
She is not a conventional American beauty – there is perhaps still too much of
that goofy adolescent in some of her facial expressions – yet she has tamed
her frizz into a stylish blonde curtain, she is slim and often elegantly
clad in modern designer wear, and it’s hard to take your eyes off her when
she speaks. People rarely say that about her mother.
She is prone, like her father, to rambling on earnestly when talking about
issues, but also like Bill, she always seems in command of her subject,
whether it is Chinese leverage over the US economy or the usefulness of
solar power. She has developed the knack of turning every question into an
adoring plug for her mother.
In Wisconsin she began an answer on healthcare: “One of the things I
appreciate about my mother . . .” In Akron, Ohio, she told a student: “I’m
so grateful you asked me that question [about Iraq] because one of the
things I love about my mom . . .” To students in Massa-chusetts she added:
“I’m really proud that my mom was one of the first US senators to call the
situation in Darfur genocide.”
Her performances have been winning her raves from Democratic insiders. “She’s
a remarkable young woman,” says James Carville, Bill’s former campaign guru.
“I think she’s obviously very smart and she’s found her voice and I think
she feels very intently about this campaign.” A cover story in New York
magazine concluded of Chelsea last week: “She’s a natural politician,
stunningly good at it.”
Yet is America really up for another round of the Clinton family follies? What
is it about American politics that provokes this endless speculation about
Kennedys, Bushes and Clintons?
Much has been made in this campaign (mainly by Obama supporters) of the
alarming fact that if Hillary becomes president and serves two terms, the
Clintons and Bushes will between them have occupied the White House for 28
uninterrupted years.
Then, of course, there’s Jeb Bush, the president’s brother and former governor
of Florida who continues to lurk at the margins of Republican presidential
reckoning. Jeb’s son, George P Bush, is regarded as a future threat.
Mercifully there has been no sign that Barbara and Jenna Bush, George
Dubya’s fun-loving twins, are pondering political careers.
Perhaps surprisingly, many US presidential historians see no harm in dynastic
rule, which has long characterised American government at national, state
and municipal level.
The Frelinghuysen family of New Jersey has provided six generations of
senators and congressmen. The Daley family has ruled Chicago for ever. Al
Gore is the son of a senator; Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the
House of Representatives, is the daughter of a congressman. There have been
two Adams family presidents, two Roosevelts and everyone has lost count of
the Kennedys who currently hold public office.
“Some families are very good at politics,” shrugs Pedro Dal Bo, author of a
study on congressional dynasties. In a recent article entitled “Royal
Presidents”, the historian Michael Barone noted that “it’s hard ina very
large democracy for voters to judge a potential leader . . . it helps if you
know the family”.
The evidence from this year’s campaign is that dynastic issues have not hurt
Hillary as much as the perception that she has simply been part of the
Washington furniture too long. Obama has capitalised on youth, newness and
the promise of change.
All this has encouraged the increasingly frequent suggestion that Chelsea is
being groomed for a political future. “My political aspirations stretch to
having my mom be president,” she replies coolly whenever the question is
broached.
She has also made clear that she does not intend to move back into the White
House should her mother pull off what would now be a major upset in
November. “Would you want to move back in with your parents when you’re 28?”
she said at one of her meetings.
Yet in one sense the genie is out of the bottle, and Chelsea may have to spend
the rest of her life denying that she’s a presidential candidate. Forced by
her mother’s failings to court a political spotlight she had previously
avoided, she has inadvertently given America a glimpse of a different style
of Clinton – the charm and the seriousness without the controversy.
So far America seems to like what it sees.
Americans elect their monarch and revere them, we inherit ours and ignore them.
I prefer our way.
Ross, Brighton,
This couldn't be more succulent if it were in the Clintons' own handwriting!!!!!
RD, Newcastle,