Coming out of the shadows

LONG gone was the awkward curly-haired teenager with braces, fiercely protected from the media during her White House childhood. Gone too, the determinedly private young woman who spent much of her twenties in denial of her status as a public figure.

Chelsea Clinton’s willingness to take to Twitter to talk about her mother’s recovery, and a remarkably open interview last year in Vogue, mark a new phase for a young woman who will be 33 next month and is ready to use her public position to promote the things she cares about.

“Historically, I deliberately tried to lead a private life in the public eye. And now I am trying to lead a purposefully public life,” she told Jonathan Van Meter, who was given two months’ access to her life.

Her emergence comes just in time for America, which is facing something of a Clinton vacuum: Hillary ceases to be President Obama’s Secretary of State later this month. There could yet be another act for Hillary if she chooses to run for president in four years’ time, when she will be 69. But, for the moment, the focus is on her daughter — who grew up in the Arkansas Governor’s mansion and moved into the White House at the age of 12.

The paparazzi-lens version of her life really began in 2010 with her Long Island wedding to a childhood friend, hedge-fund manager Marc Mezvinsky: then it was Marc and Chelsea out walking their Yorkshire terrier, Soren, or Chelsea out in the Flatiron district of New York in her running gear. But now she’s picking up the pace. A new, self-assured Chelsea is emerging, teaching graduate classes at Columbia or supporting the work of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, covering everything from women’s health and education in the developing world to recovery efforts around New York after Hurricane Sandy. She has also found her feet in television journalism, after initially catty reviews which derided the soft subjects she tackled as a special correspondent for NBC.

In many ways she comes across as a normal Manhattan thirtysomething, driven on coffee and obsessively running along the West Side Highway.

Vogue dressed her in Burberry and Marc Jacobs, and she doesn’t ignore fashion in her private life; she dressed for a recent Clinton party in platform stilettos, J Brand jeans and a jacket by the cool Brits-in-New-York label, Rag & Bone. She told Vogue: “Marc and I go to a movie every Sunday. We ride the subway. It’s one of the great gifts of New York City. Why would I want to miss that?” But she does have a chief of staff and a press secretary, as well as an overachievement gene that means she seems able to juggle three careers — as an academic, philanthropist and journalist.

Certainly, she has the attributes to go far in public life, not least the drive of her mother and the Southern charm of her father. Like her mother, it is said, she speaks in fully-formed paragraphs, and at Columbia she lectures for an hour on cross-national health policy without looking at her notes.

Hank Sheinkopf, one of America’s most experienced political consultants, puts it simply: “Americans love dynasties, as do the British. We have the Bush dynasty, the Cuomo dynasty, the Kennedy dynasty. We could have the Clinton dynasty. We like to see the family members of people we like engaged in our politics. Does Chelsea Clinton have a future in American politics? It’s up to her.

“Is she ready to go into public office? She’s a kind person — at least she appears to be a kind person — who is compassionate and has strong opinions without being overbearing. She has the Clinton look. The hope is also that she will have the Clinton political instinct as well.”

She certainly bears some scars from growing up in public. At a recent event she was chairing, she referenced in a visceral way the time when the rightwing shock-jock Rush Limbaugh thought she was an acceptable target. “I was 13,” she recalled. “In 1993, he said: ‘You may know that the Clintons have a cat, Socks, in the White House. They also have a dog.’ And then he put a picture of me on the screen.”

As the young Obama daughters take a second turn around the course as First Daughters, that attack is a sobering reminder of the pressure placed on children drawn towards the spotlight by political parents.

There was a long gap after the Kennedys brought small children up in the White House in the early 60s. After that, it’s been only daughters: Amy Carter in the 1970s, then Chelsea in the 1990s. George W. Bush’s twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, were 19 years old when he became president. Malia and Sasha were only 10 and 7 when they first moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Amy Carter White House years can be distilled into four anecdotes: she had a cat named Misty Malarky Ying Yang; she roller-skated through the East Room; she had a treehouse on the East Lawn where a security guy would be detailed to stand underneath when she had sleepovers; and she once got rather unfairly criticised for a diplomatic error when she was caught reading a book at a state banquet. She was namechecked, as she approached 13, during a presidential debate between her father and Ronald Reagan — Jimmy Carter revealing that his daughter’s biggest concern was the control of nuclear arms. A period of student activism saw her join anti-apartheid sit-ins and experience an arrest and acquittal over her part in a protest about alleged CIA recruitment at the University of Massachusetts.

Now aged 45, she is married with one son and is on the board of counsellors at the Carter Centre, her parents’ not-for-profit organisation which promotes human rights.

Jenna Bush was arrested twice in five weeks early on in her father’s time as president, first in Austin for possessing alcohol under the age of 21, and then when she was caught using a fake ID to buy drink.

Now 31, she is married and is pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Henry Hager, was an aide to Karl Rove, her father’s deputy chief of staff.

Jenna works part-time in a Baltimore school and has worked in Panama with Unicef, which inspired the first of two books about education. But she has also worked for the past three years as an occasional correspondent on MSNBC’s Today Show. In recent months she has interviewed the boy band One Direction — and her grandfather, George H W Bush.

Barbara has moved quite a distance from core Republican issues. She lives in Greenwich Village, has worked with Aids patients in Africa, was co-founder and president of the Global Health Corps non-profit group and joined a New York activist video in favour of same-sex marriage. What of the two Obama girls? Malia now 14 and Sasha 11. They are already being called rising style-stars, and at Christmas they drew admiration for their sequins and silver. Malia looks destined to become the tallest of the Obama family during the next four years: she’s already 5ft 11ins — apparently even taller than the First Lady.

Michelle Obama’s most impressive role has been in giving young women from ordinary backgrounds the belief that they do not have to settle for small jobs, but can get a strong education and be ambitious.

The Obamas have tried to strive for normal. Yes, the girls have met Beyoncé and Jay-Z, but they have to make their own beds, Michelle’s mother meets them from school and family dinner is at 6.30pm most days. A proud father spoke in his acceptance speech of them growing up into two strong, smart, beautiful women. Hopefully they were smiling: the family golden rule is “no poker face”. But the scrutiny has never been greater and the pitfalls are discussed.

Michelle has said that the family have spoken about the repercussions of an Obama daughter being caught acting “bratty” in the era of mobile phones and uploaded video.