Chelsea Clinton tells students about her mother's plans for the economy and home mortgages. The former first daughter outlines Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's concern about Darfur and women's rights. She ticks through talking points on electability, health care and the environment.
Oh, and she reveals her mother wants grandkids and her father -- former president Bill Clinton -- builds their schedule around a popular TV medical drama, Grey's Anatomy.
Chelsea Clinton has emerged as a top surrogate for her mother as the former first lady has fallen behind Senator Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
PHOTO: AP
Now dispatched to college campuses, the long-silent Chelsea Clinton has sought to blend campaign spin with personal touches. But she has also drawn a share of unsought attention, including an MSNBC cable TV reporter who suggested she is being "pimped out" by her parents.
The Clintons instituted a firm circle of silence around their daughter when Bill Clinton won his first White House term in 1992. And she began this campaign as uneasy stage-dressing beside her mother -- even ordered to hold supporters' jackets on one New Hampshire stage. In Iowa and New Hampshire, she never spoke.
By now, she is a full-fledged player in the campaign, something she had vowed to avoid.
"I live and work in New York and have had a private life -- at least, did until about five weeks ago," she lamented during a stop at Dayton's Sinclair Community College in Ohio. She's an associate with Avenue Capital, a US$12 billion hedge fund run by Marc Lasry, a longtime Clinton donor.
She has tried to be a good sport about her new role. At Sinclair, she wore an oversized school sweat shirt that muted her clapping. As she took the microphone, she pushed up the sleeves and went to work trying to sell her mother's campaign.
While the answers are almost identical to her mother's, the presentation is far from it. Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail is a polished professional -- every hand gesture and every pause choreographed for maximum effect. Chelsea lacks the precise execution her mother has perfected. Chelsea's voice is soft and often trails off at the end of sentences, which frustrates audiences.
"Where did she go to school," Ohio Wesleyan student Erica Hankins asked a campaign aide during one of Chelsea's appearances.
She attended Stanford University and Oxford in England, the aide answered.
"You'd think they would teach her how to talk louder," Hankins replied dryly.
Despite growing up around politicians and campaigns, political life is clearly not her strength.
"The full stretch of my political aspiration is to help her be my president," she said. And she doesn't plan to run for office herself or move back into the White House.
"I'm 27. I'm not going to be moving back in with parents, as much as I love them," she says repeatedly on the trail.
While pressing her mother's case, she still has refused to talk on-the-record to reporters. She politely smiles when reporters ask questions.
In Iowa, she even refused to answer questions from a nine-year-old Scholastic News reporter.
Her new role has not come without criticism. Chelsea Clinton has been calling and meeting with superdelegates, the lawmakers, governors and party officials who are chosen outside the primary and caucus system but have a vote at the party's national convention.
MSNBC reporter David Shuster noted that she refuses to answer questions about what she's doing. Shuster was later suspended for suggesting she had been "pimped out." The phrase typically refers to prostitution.
Her visit to a New Haven, Connecticut, polling location -- where she delivered coffee to election workers -- raised the question of whether she was campaigning illegally close to where people vote.
In the final campaign push, she has tried to humanize her parents. When an Ohio State University student asked last week about health care, she worked her mother's wish to be a grandmother into her answer: "What your girlfriend needs is different than what I may need -- is different than what I would need when I make my mother happy and give her grandchildren -- is different than what my grandmother needs ... There are different health needs based on our situations."
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS