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Chelsea takes on role in Clinton camp

Chelsea Clinton, center, waves to onlookers while riding aboard a street trolley with other supporters of her mother, Senator Hillary Clinton, on Saturday in Honolulu, Hawaii. PHOTO: AP

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.

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."
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