Brass Knuckles

It’s hard for some of us to remember that Chelsea Clinton is not a little girl anymore, just like it’s suprising for those of us who grew up with the Andy Griffin Show and Happy Days to see Ron Howard as a middle age father.  This is all part of the cycle, though.  Chelsea is a twenty eight year old graduate of Stanford University with a masters from Oxford. She works for the Avenue Capital Group hedge fund, after working for McKinsey and taking a job with a six-figure starting salary right out of college.  My guess is that she’s making a minimum now of a quarter million a year, and she’s on the campaign trail for her mom.   She’s not the gangly 12 year old that we remember.

She is, however, still getting a fair amount of coddling from the media.  On the campaign trail, the issue of Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment hearings against her father has popped up more than once, and Chelsea has been quick to shut it down as “none of their business”.    If her dad were simply another DC lawyer having an affair with an intern, and Chelsea were running for office, I’d buy into that.  Her father, however, was not just any DC lawyer, and her mother was not only married to him;  she’s now running for president.  The AP reports that the question is being primarily asked by malcontents and attention hounds.

Many in the crowd at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., booed Monday when a question about the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton came up. Chelsea Clinton quickly summed up her position: “If that’s what you want to vote on, that’s what you should vote on. But I think there are other people (who are) going to vote on things like health care and economics,” she said.

Amanda Morris, president of Purdue’s Students for Hillary chapter, said Tuesday that she approved of the audience reaction and how Clinton is responding. She also expects the question might keep coming up.

“I really think it has gotten to the point where it is the attention thing,” said Morris, a sophomore from Kokomo, Ind. “At first, maybe that student really wanted to know what she thought about it. But by now it’s ‘Oh, that person got attention for it, I’m going to keep asking.’”

Kyle Drennen of Newsbusters explores the topic in more detail, and has some media criticism of the coverage.

On Wednesday’s CBS “Early Show,” co-host Harry Smith discussed a question being asked of Chelsea Clinton about Monica Lewinsky on the campaign trail with Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn, who was baffled by the media’s refusal to ask Chelsea tough questions: “Frankly, in all of my years of journalism, I have never seen the press lie down like this before. This is — this is not what the American public thinks of as the critical and sort of — killing, marauding, press corps – ” Smith responded by admitting that: “Yeah, we’re not exactly — we’re not exactly watchdogs here.” [Audio available here]

If VP Cheney’s lesbian daughter was not off limits, I don’t see how President Clinton’s impeachment and Mrs. Clinton’s role is off-limits.