Chelsea Clinton

President-elect Bill Clinton announced Tuesday that his 12-year-old daughter, Chelsea, will attend an exclusive private school in northwest Washington, calling the move a "family decision" and not a statement about the city's troubled public schools. "They didn't reject public schools," George Stephanopoulos, communications director for the Clinton transition, said. "The schools in the District of Columbia and across the country are good schools and Gov.

A Stanford Daily columnist lost his job after writing about Chelsea Clinton in violation of the student paper's policy to ignore the "First Freshman" unless she does something newsworthy. Jesse Oxfeld wrote an opinion column questioning the university's policy of treating the president's daughter like any other freshman when her parents turned opening day into a circus of TV cameras, Secret Service agents and police dogs.

Artist Nicholas Hernandez normally tunes out when it comes to Washington politics. But he's clued in when it comes to the first family. The Laguna Beach wood sculptor donated a portrait he made of first daughter Chelsea Clinton, hand-delivering the gift to Hillary Rodham Clinton at a charity fund-raiser in San Francisco in June. "It's a major break for me," Hernandez, 54, said.

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?

Why is this cat smiling? To understand, you have to know where he has been and where he may go. "Socks" (the painting), was created in 1993 by Michele Weston Relkin of Thousand Oaks. She is a cat fancier, artist and children's art teacher who noticed that when Chelsea Clinton moved into the White House she was almost always photographed carrying her beloved cat. "I wanted to ease her path a bit, growing up in that difficult environment. I decided to give her a portrait of Socks."

She wears baseball caps and sunglasses and subdues her abundant auburn locks in a ponytail to avoid notice when she shops or bikes around Washington. Her Secret Service agents drive a nondescript Jeep, dress casually and keep watch from a distance. She takes vacations--without her parents--that virtually no one knows about. During her five years in the White House, Chelsea Clinton has carefully guarded her own privacy, perhaps as jealously as her parents have.

As the candidate, Bill Clinton took it on the chin for reports of infidelity and draft dodging. As the candidate's independent wife, Hillary got it for being "uppity." Now that they have survived, it's Chelsea's turn. At issue is her appearance. "Her hair is fuzzy and she has braces," Hunter College High School student Samantha Shapiro wrote in the New York Times last month. "She has that 'I'm in limbo between Jr. Miss and Misses at Bloomingdale's' look."

When Secret Service agents deliver Chelsea Clinton to the Sidwell Friends School for her first day of classes as the daughter of President Bill Clinton, she will be entering a unique educational-religious tradition extending back 300 years. Sidwell, founded in 1883 by educator Thomas W.