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Ann, your daughter is surely right that nobody pressured Chelsea Clinton into making those calls on her mom's behalf—but I'm not even sure that's what David Shuster was saying. "Pimped out" is pretty harsh, and not something anyone would have said about Cate Edwards or the Bush twins or the Kerry girls, but why is that? I think it's because for a young woman who grew up in the White House, Chelsea has enjoyed a pretty impressive zone of privacy—so that when her parents, who've convinced everybody that she's still off-limits, even as an adult and even on the campaign trail, do seem to be bringing her forward for their own reasons, as they did at the height of Monica madness, it's seen as hypocritical. (Everybody wants to have it both ways, but Bill and Hill often actually get to, and not everybody admires their ability to pull that off.)
Calling Shuster's remark "beneath contempt'' is perhaps going a shade too far as well, no? MSNBC has suspended him for saying such a thing. And he's the latest in a long line of people who have regretted ever mentioning Chelsea—from the kid who was fired from the Stanford Daily for writing about her being on campus to SNL's Lorne Michaels for the infamous Wayne's World skit in which she was described as a "future fox'' to ... well, John McCain, whose awful joke about Janet Reno being her daddy will really come back to haunt him now.
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Emily B, I'm with you that I'm left feeling very uneasy about Chelsea's emergence on the campaign trail. She makes me think of Michael Corleone in Godfather III: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" How many times can one person be First Child? She's waved goodbye to her Secret Service agents and the press hordes, grown up, started a career, and now the poor thing has been pulled back in. All these months, as she's stood there silently behind her mother, I've wondered about their dynamic. Did Chelsea say, "Mom, I want to do anything to help you win, but please don't make me speak"? Or did Hillary say, "Baby, I need you out there to prove that I'm a human being. All you have to do is stand there and smile; you don't even have to speak"? Now Chelsea is calling talk-show hosts begging them to vote for her mother and forwarding unhinged rants about sexism. Yes, she's now an adult able to make her own decisions, but I feel sorry for her. What must it have been like to grow up in the Clinton White House?
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Geez, Juliet, I hope you don't believe that Republicans are all cold-hearted greedmeisters while Democrats are all selfless philanthropists! I bet I can think of a few greedy Democrats and, if I try hard enough, a generous Republican or two.
I can see the apparent contradiction you cite, but I don't know, in the case of the first daughters, that either apple has fallen that far from the tree. Hillary Clinton wasn't doing pro-bono work all those years at the Rose law firm. (And thank goodness, since the Arkansas' governor's salary was reportedly $35,000!) As for Jenna, well, it's hard to read a profile of the Bush family without coming across the term noblesse oblige. Sometimes that means serving in government, other times maybe it means heading down to Latin America to work with AIDS patients, as Jenna did. And let us not forget that Laura Bush is a former schoolteacher and librarian-her influence is apparent in Jenna's choices.
It's easy to sympathize with the children-even young-adult children-of presidents. Chelsea had to watch her parents' marital issues morph into a constitutional crisis, and lord knows the Bush twins didn't do anything in college that I didn't get away with quite anonymously. But one of the fringe benefits has got to be how well-connected you are when ready to enter the workforce. So in some ways it's probably easier to branch out and try something that defies expectations.
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