Delicious Hit Piece: How a ‘Weird’ Chelsea Clinton is Getting in On the Family Business

By  Maureen Callahan

In 2012, four years after sort-of-stumping-but-not-really for her mother’s presidential campaign, Chelsea Clinton sat down for a lengthy, laudatory profile for Vogue. “Historically, I deliberately tried to lead a private life in the public eye,” she said. “And now I am trying to lead a purposefully public life.”

Last April, Clinton told Fast Company magazine much the same thing. As she also did with NBC’s Brian Williams, who interviewed Clinton after she was hired by the network as a “special correspondent” — albeit one with no journalism experience. Her starting salary: $600,000 a year.

“For most of my life I did deliberately lead a private life and inadvertently led a public life,” Clinton said. She was now ready to do us the favor of stepping into the spotlight, prodded by her late grandmother. “[She told me] that being Chelsea Clinton had happened to me, and that I had a responsibility to do something with that asset and opportunity,” she told Williams.

Yet for all this talk from a lifelong public person about her recent decision to become a public person, Chelsea Clinton, now 34, remains an enigma. She is the Derek Jeter of the political world, adept at talking coherently while saying nothing. Who she is, what drives her, what she believes in — aside from her family’s political primacy — is unknown.

Chelsea has held a series of jobs with sketchy descriptions, her accomplishments vague. She depicts herself as just another New Yorker, going to SoulCycle, taking the train, going to the movies every Sunday — yet she demands a level of obeisance any true New Yorker would find laughable.

“This is my gracious challenge with her,” NBC producer Jay Kernis told Vogue. “People in television constantly interrupt each other. But when you are with Chelsea, you really need to allow her to finish. She is not used to being interrupted that way.”

She is also, it turns out, not necessarily the future of the Democratic Party. As Daniel Halper reveals in a curiously overlooked chapter from his new book, “Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine” (Broadside Books), Chelsea is, for good and for ill, very much like her parents.

“The whole way she’s approached her emergence,” one Clinton aide told Halper, “has been very self-laudatory and kind of selfish.”

Another close observer put it more succinctly: “She’s weird.”

Chelsea Clinton was born on Feb. 27, 1980, the only child of then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. From a very early age, her parents trained her to survive the worst of politics.

When she was 6 years old, Bill and Hillary sat her down and tried to explain how campaigning worked: Mainly, lots of people would say awful things about her dad.
“Bill said terrible things about himself,” Hillary wrote in “It Takes a Village.” “Like how he was really mean to people and didn’t try to help them.”

Their daughter burst into tears, but the Clintons kept going, saying vile things about themselves — not stopping until Chelsea learned to stop crying.

Read the rest here.