Campaign trail gets bumpy for Chelsea Clinton
For the first time, the poised and intelligent former first daughter is facing the kind of scrutiny that has bedeviled the candidates and their surrogates.
EUGENE, ORE. — The softballs come gently, lobbed by voters who support her mother and are thrilled to see that the awkward duckling of the Clinton administration has become a glamorous swan.
What is your mother's position on healthcare? What will your mother do for special education? What is your mother's plan to end the war in Iraq?
Chelsea Clinton, a 28-year-old self-proclaimed "numbers dork" who is on leave from her job at a New York hedge fund, answers in whole sentences and long paragraphs filled with wonky phrases and filial pride. She never talks to icky reporters (not even 9-year-olds, you may recall).
Nonetheless, this strategy has lately failed to protect her from icky questions.
Students in states with upcoming primaries have asked whether the Monica Lewinsky scandal and her father's impeachment have adversely affected her mother's credibility.
"I do not think that is any of your business," she told a Butler University student in Indiana on March 25.
The following week, the topic came up at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "I think that is something that is personal to my family," she said. "But also on a larger point, I don't think you should vote for or against my mother because of my father."
These moments have generated headlines -- partly because of her unflinching answers--and also because they raise questions about what subjects she can fairly be expected to address. For the first time, she is facing the kind of scrutiny that has bedeviled the candidates and their surrogates along the campaign trail.
During a long day of campaigning in Oregon on Saturday, she mentioned at two different stops that during the course of the campaign a 7-year-old and an 11-year-old had separately asked her "with terror in their eyes" what will become of the Social Security system. It's possible they were precocious, or that their parents put them up to it, but one skeptical blogger wrote afterward that the story was "stunning in its absurdity."
(When asked for details, such as where and when Clinton met the children, the campaign could not provide them.)
Hillary Rodham Clinton has recently stopped telling the story of a pregnant Ohio woman who lost her baby then died because she lacked health insurance and proper prenatal care. The New York senator had recounted the story as it was told to her, but the account turned out to be oversimplified and wrong on some key details, according to news reports.
