The chasing of Chelsea

Until last week, the American press had an unwritten but strictly observed pact with the White House. The terms were clear and straightforward. Chelsea Clinton was off-limits. For six years, Chelsea has been protected from media intrusion. From themoment she came to Washington as a shy 12-year-old with braces on her teeth, she was able to live behind a wall of silence. While her parents’ every public move was scrutinised and interpreted on a daily basis, the First Daughter was able to grow up away from the limelight. The pact ended when the Post broke the taboo, quoting `friends at Stanford’ who said that Chelsea had checked in to the medical centre `complaining of shortness of breath and clutching her forehead. She was rubbing her temples and was breathing quickly,’ the Post source claimed. `She said she was under a lot of stress, then she mentioned she’d just ended a long-term relationship and that it was causing her a lot of distress. She kept saying `I’m not adjusting well’, over and over’. What happened next was the familiar process of media recycling, into which even those who disapproved were drawn. The Associated Press picked up the story and put out a version on its wires. It was picked up by radio stations across the US. In themainstream American papers, the story was then picked up by the media correspondents and retold as a tale about press values, though with all key details supplied. The fact that Chelsea may now be treated as fair game by the media is the latest example of this year’s gradual and very painful convergence between America’s tabloid media culture and the much more high-minded broadsheet dailies. But the chasing of Chelsea is not just a hand-wringing tale about the coarsening of American public life. The White House may protest about declining media standards, but the truth is that the White House itself has not balked at playing the Chelsea card when it felt it needed to.

The most prominent example of this strategy came last August, on the day after Bill Clinton’s fateful grand jury testimony in the Lewinsky scandal. As the Clintons emerged from the White House to brave the cameras the next morning, Chelsea Clinton conspicuously held her parents together. When they arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, Chelsea’s rolewas even more prominent. Unbelievably, this normally reticent teenager was suddenly the most central icon of the moment. She lingered much longer than usual in front of the cameras, smiling and shaking hands with party loyalist welcomers, before departing with a wave.

It is not hard to see why Chelsea is such an asset in a world in which people form judgments about public figures on the basis of little hard evidence. Opinion polls show that Chelsea Clinton is very popular with the American public in a way which her father cannot rival.

People feel sorry for her, admire her for her apparent optimism and her young-adult dignity. She seems like the kind of daughter that any family would be proud of, and she is therefore a crucial riposte to those who claim that the Clintons are private monsters. The striking comparison here is with Prince William. In Britain, the public insists on projecting on to the next generation of royals the hope that the prince will grow into a better person with a less troubled lifethan his parents.

In many ways Chelsea Clinton plays a similar role. Though she never speaks in public, and few who really know her speak about her either, Americans seize on signs that she plays an important role in reconciling and counselling her parents. “I love my dad. I understand. I can cope,” she is alleged to have said as the President began to confess privately, then publicly, to a more truthful version of his relationship with Lewinsky.

Will this be a story with a happy ending, in which Chelsea pulls the Clintons together, restores her parents’ relationship, copes with the break-up of her romance with Matthew Pierce and continues to grow up into the adult daughter that any parents would be proud of? The reality is that no one, not even the tabloids, knows.

Or perhaps the real guide to the real Chelsea is a story told by Clinton biographer David Maraniss. The year is 1988, and Governor Clinton is deciding whether to run for his party’s presidential nomination. Clinton and his chum MickeyKantor are on the lawn of the governor’s mansion, debating whether to make a run, when the seven-year-old Chelsea runs out from the house and asks about the family’s summer holiday plans. Clinton, stumblingly, confesses that he might not be able to come because he may be running for president. “Well,” replies Chelsea, “then Mom and I will go without you.”