Easy Ride

Time for Chelsea Clinton's Easy Ride to End

Why is the press treating a wealthy, 35-year-old political operative like she's still a White House kid?

By Jack Shafer

When precisely did Chelsea Clinton complete her transition from a White House kid whom journalists agreed to treat as off-limits to a public figure deserving of the full scrutiny of the press corps?

The unsettling answer to the question appears to be, “Not yet.” The soon-to-be 36-year-old occupies the status of an American princess—Diana on the Potomac, if you will. The press covers her, of course, attempting to ask her substantive question, but mostly she exists to grace the covers of magazines—Fast Company and Elle most recently—and be treated to lighter-than-air puff pieces.

Few object to the cone of deference the press places over the actual children who reside in the White House, or their parents’ attempts to construct a privacy zone around them. Even after White House kids are no longer minors and move on to college, as Chelsea did in 1997, most reporters and editors resist covering them as news in themselves. Unless a White House kid breaks the law, takes measures to make their private profile public, or otherwise becomes “newsworthy” (is injured in an accident, is stalked, etc.), the press basically turns a blind eye.

But at some point—early adulthood—the general immunity from critical coverage needs to end. The threshold for newsworthiness recedes, and the children of presidents become more like the siblings, cousins, uncles and parents of presidents. In other words, if one of President Obama’s daughters got busted for drunk driving, few would expect saturation coverage from the press. But, say, had Obama’s Boston aunt gotten arrested for drunk driving before she died in 2014, there would have been no reason for the press to turn a blind eye. Chelsea Clinton should be treated no more royally than the Nixon daughters, Susan Ford, Amy Carter, the Gore children, or the Bush and Reagan progeny.

The coverage threshold falls lower still if a grown-up White House kid expands her own public profile, as Chelsea Clinton most definitely has. She has maintained a role as adviser and advocate inside the Clinton family’s political dynasty since leaving Stanford University. In late 2011, she crossed over to the dark and often invasive art of journalism, working at NBC News as a special correspondent ($600,000/year) until August 2014. Today, Chelsea serves as vice chair of the politically controversial Clinton Foundation, which has raised $2 billion since 2001. She’s a board member at Barry Diller’s IAC (paid a reported $300,000 a year, plus stock awards). She charges $65,000 per speech. Last fall, she published a book on “empowerment” for kids. She’s powerful. She exercises influence. She’s all grown up, soon to be the mother of two. If she isn’t newsworthy, nobody is.

As is her right, Chelsea picks and chooses how to respond to the press. Had you lived through the White House sex scandals as she did, you might not have affection for the press, either. For years, when approached by reporters asking questions, she would politely demur. In 2007, while stumping for her mother’s presidential campaign, shaking hands with voters and posting for photos, Chelsea spun her advocacy from the softest cotton—with no message exceeding the “vote for my mom, she’s the best” variety. She worked hard, traveling thousands of highway miles, visiting more than 100 campuses and dialing up to 60 names a day in support of the Clinton campaign.

But she refused to talk to the press, famously brushing off a fourth-grader from Scholastic News at a campaign event who asked her an innocuous political question.

“I’m sorry,” Chelsea said. “I don’t talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately. Even though I think you’re cute.”

As Vanity Fair reported, in early 2008 the Clinton campaign placed “warning calls” to David Shuster, then at MSNBC, the day after he asked her a couple of questions (that went unanswered) at a campaign event. Chelsea, age 27, was off-limits, the campaign said.

As the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign gathered steam, Chelsea agreed to sit for interviews with the press, but most of them were of the softball variety with Fusion, Ellen DeGeneres and Extra. But whenever the questions turn probing, Chelsea tends to shut down. At a April 2015 Council on Foreign Relations forum in New York, ABC News anchor Juju Chang asked her to respond to the news stories that criticized the Clinton Foundation's fundraising methods. “Not surprisingly, Chelsea punted,” wrote the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove about the session. Instead, she discussed all the good work the foundation does. Grove continued, “Needless to say, I was thwarted in my efforts to ask Chelsea a follow-up question as she left the building after patiently greeting a receiving line of admirers.”

A similar thing happened last fall on the Today show after Savannah Guthrie asked Chelsea how she felt about poll results in which respondents linked Hillary Clinton to the words “dishonest,” “untrustworthy” and “liar.” Chelsea retreated into the realm of the non-answer. “I’m not a pundit, I’m a daughter,” she said, and spoke instead of how proud she was to have Hillary as her mother.

Perhaps Chelsea avoids serious talks with the press because she’s smart enough to know that words betray her when she speaks extemporaneously, as she did in the middle of January when a young voter asked her how to mobilize young American’s for the Clinton campaign. Chelsea dug a hole, jumped into it, and dug deeper to attack Bernie Sanders as someone who wants to “dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare and private insurance.”

If there is any way to understand Bernie Sanders, the socialist who somehow interrupted the otherwise inevitable trajectory of Hillary Clinton to the presidency, the key might be in his home state of Vermont. Vermont might be known for its hippie ice cream pioneers and sustainable farmers (“Bernie Sanders is a human Birkenstock!” Hillary Clinton yelled in a Saturday Night Live skit in December), but Vermont and its politics are also oddly varied, with mostly rural residents and the same small-government inclinations that usually characterize rural voters. When Bernie Sanders started his political career there in the 70s, he pushed to unionize workers but stayed away from environmental or gun control issues that might have negative effects on the independent livelihoods of the loggers, hunters and farmers that inhabit the state. “I found Vermonters to care more about issues and results than party affiliation,” Los Angeles-based photographer Elijah Hurwitz told Politico Magazine after he visited the state to shoot a visual history of Bernie’s time in Vermont. The resulting photos dig into Bernie Sanders’s 30-year history in the state, where his deeply personal politics have transformed him into a well-known character everywhere from neighbors’ dairy farms to local pig roasts. It’s the same Bernie we see on a national stage today, drawing together unlikely coalitions and energizing a base that is upsetting the best-laid plans of a woman who was thought to be the front-runner years before 2016. Above, large painted mural of Bernie Sanders is seen on a barn in the rural Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont. The mural is the work of Venice, California, based street artist Jules Muck.

Such Democrats as former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod were appalled by Chelsea’s reckless charge. PolitiFact rated Chelsea’s comment as “Mostly False“ as it “makes it sound like Sanders’ plan would leave many people uninsured, which is antithetical to the goal of Sanders’ proposal: universal health care.”

Sharp rebukes came almost immediately from With All Due Respect’s John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Halperin repeatedly pronounced himself “stunned” by the attack. Heilemann called the jab “historic,” continuing to say that it was “disingenuous” and “just a lie” that Sanders seeks to strip health care from people. The duo relit the fire the following day, as Halperin declared himself perplexed by the “lack of interest that most of the news world had to her remarks.” He added, “As far as we could tell, very few of our media colleagues were as blown away by Chelsea’s rhetoric as we were.” Heilemann responded that the show “got a lot of blowback” for having ripped Chelsea’s comments the previous day, and attributed the media complacency to the “muscle memory” acquired by the media over the years that instructs them to instinctively treat White House kids as off-limits no matter how old they are.

“There’s little doubt that today, what some in the Clinton orbit call the ‘invisible hand of Chelsea’ shapes almost every significant decision her parents make,” wrote POLITICO’s Kenneth P. Vogel last April in a feature story about the political scion. The time for treating her as a fragile kid has long passed. Nor does she occupy some ceremonial function as international goodwill ambassador that places her beyond reproach. She’s an educated (Stanford, Columbia, Oxford), mature, wealthy, campaign surrogate and a well-connected ex-journalist who knows the score. “I had very much led a deliberately private life for a long time, and now I’m attempting to lead a perfectly public life,” as she told CNN in 2013.

Chelsea Clinton deserves no special treatment from the press, and from what I can tell, she no longer expects it. “I’m really grateful I grew up in a house in which media literacy was a survival skill,” she said upon becoming an NBC News correspondent in 2011. Nobody put it better than  Halperin last month when he said, “The notion of laying off her seems ridiculous. Fair coverage, but not no coverage.”