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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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Ann Coulter is not so much a partisan as she is a performance artist, and her medium is the lie. So, normally, when she takes the stage and does her thing, there is nothing to conclude, beyond the fact that just as Gene Kelly had to dance and Karen Finley worked with chocolate, she is making it up because that is what she does. Well, that and to keep her skills up. So while it might be a pity she didn't hang in there with the tap lessons, we shouldn't take it to heart.
Today, however, in remarks about how she'll campaign for Hillary Clinton over John McCain if he is her party's presidential nominee, Coulter has shown new range by betraying something closer than usual to the truth. No, not that she'd ever actually support Clinton; even if she is all show, she is nothing if not a canny entrepreneur, and she knows her customer.
Yet even more than actual conservatives, those who only play them on TV would be beyond disappointed to see Barack Obama take the nomination away from the right's favorite chew toy. Not only because Republicans consider Clinton the weaker candidate in the general. (And if they don't, then why did George W. Bush come so close to endorsing her?) But also because these professionals have their careers to think of and would hate to even contemplate letting all those '90s-scandal recyclables go to waste. Can you imagine the years of preparation wasted, the patience unrewarded, and Billary best sellers left unwritten? Which is why I suspect Ann Coulter of seeing in Hillary Clinton a candidate who—ready or not for the actual job—would be distracted from Day One. And this time only, she could be right.
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