Bitch may be the new black, but Chelsea is the new bitch

As the presidential race tightens its grip around Hillary Clinton’s neck, former first daughter Chelsea has been stepping up to the podium to do some damage-control. She was very purposefully kept out of the spotlight during the White House years when she entered as a frizzy-haired 12-year-old and surfaced a well-adjusted Stanford University junior. Now nearing 28 years old (her birthday is tomorrow), Chelsea is ostensibly doing this on her own terms.

Which means, for the most part, no interviews.

So what we can gather about this budding politician (don’t pretend you weren’t waiting for it) comes mostly secondhand and through her political presence at her mother’s rallies. To many college students, even those who consider themselves well-versed in politics and Hillary Clinton, she comes across as an encyclopedia of policies and comebacks. The New York Times quoted the founder of the University of Wisconsin at Madison “Students for Hillary” chapter as saying that Chelsea’s knowledge of nuclear base loads was “a little over my head”. Another student entered the room an Obama fan and left questioning his loyalties after feeling that Chelsea “came off as more of a regular person answering questions, but with an incredible amount of knowledge.”

Which is exactly what Chelsea was positioned to do. Except, when it comes to it, Chelsea’s wealth of knowledge would not or should not affect her mother’s presidency.

Chelsea has done a phenomenal job of staying out of the spotlight in her time at Stanford and the years following it. She had a short fling with fame and the spotlight while at Oxford as an early 20-something, but quickly renounced the Lindsay Lohan brand of glamour for a well-paying consulting job at McKinsey & Company in New York City. She left McKinsey in 2006 for a yet more rewarding position at Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund. Currently on leave for her mother’s campaign, she is attracting attention from the media for her sudden emergence as a graceful amalgam of her parents: what she did not select from the gene pool in looks, she selected in personality traits.

New York magazine says her voice is “calm, conversational – none of Hillary’s proclivity to hector” and she is capable of “poking fun at herself in ways her parents seem utterly incapable of.” And surprise, surprise: when all of America was laughing or snickering, at best, at her frizzy strawberry mess and uneven complexion, she was perfecting her mojo. NY Mag dares to label Chelsea a flirt, a quality likely derived from her father. And the unreasonable intelligence, from her mother.

But Chelsea seems, above all, to have developed a mischievous assertiveness through it all, one that could serve her mother as much as it will serve her:

“The press is still all over me in London, but on the Continent, I can do what I want,” Chelsea told Women’s Wear Daily during the fashion shows, breaking her no-interview rule. When Harry Benson showed up unannounced at Oxford to shoot her portrait for a Vanity Fair profile, Chelsea agreed to pose for him without consulting her mother. “I’m a big girl now”
- New York Magazine.

For now, she is just a mother’s daughter, doing all she knows to do in support of a loved one who has exhibited her, hid her, betrayed her, and is now profiting off of her. Chelsea has done well for a child of two politicians of notoriety, and has inevitably picked up a trick or two. In time, she will rise as the bitchiest Clinton of all, thickly veiled with her polished turns of phrase, cool composure, and refined shows of tenacity. It will be her choice to enter into the game that made her family famous, but she will indubitably be the most emotionally poised Clinton to continue the dynasty. If America will have Hillary.

[Photo courtesy of Getty Images]