Busy Chelsea, Married Lady

A Clinton is in the news again. Hillary receded from the headlines recently after she announced that she wouldn't be going for another run at the presidency. And Bill Clinton is keeping quiet, despite an apparently busy schedule of running two organizations: the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.

This time it's Chelsea. She is newly hired to work for the NBC Nightly News "Rock Center with Brian Williams" and its "Making a Difference" series.

I don't doubt that Chelsea is bright and talented. She is pursuing a doctorate in History at NYU, and has degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Columbia. She has been working since 2003, first for a management consulting firm and later for an investment firm. She is on the boards of the School of American Ballet and InterActiveCorp. She worked with Hillary during her 2008 presidential campaign and helps with her father's foundations. She clearly has some experience and background to go on a television news program.

Commentators who are calling her debut a "journalistically-bankrupt decision" may be exaggerating, and are surprisingly mean-spirited, but Breitbart is a little more informative:

Her delivery sounds more fit for an obscure web series than broadcast television; she mumbles and low talks through her questions and response. This, coupled with her name and the general knowledge of how she got her job, strikes a discordance against the sort of story she’s reporting. A tale of elite privilege sharing the story of poverty.

Will the story get attention because of her name? Yes. For her name, not for the quality of reporting. Is that the new standard defining good journalism?

She may learn to get better, but she took on this job along with a busy schedule of: Married life, doctoral studies in History at NYU, and working for her father's foundations. All this for a "feel-good" job, almost as fluffy as her wedding dress. She credits her grandmother, Hillary's mother, for: "cajoling me and challenging me to do more with my life, to lead a more of purposely public life." Didn't our current president spend many years as a "community organizer" perhaps with the same intent as First Daughter Chelsea, and the hopes of a "more purposely public life?" Are we seeing a future "Mrs. President" here, a post which Chelsea's mother couldn't quite snag, and whose biggest (and most vicious) rival was the "nice" community organizer Barack Obama? Maybe Chelsea can learn more from him than from her mother (and no need to trace back the authenticity of her various degrees).

Her husband, Mark Mezvinsky, is already complaining that he has to find ways to fit into her busy schedule, and that she is delaying having children to pursue her career. There were rumors that the marriage was under strain even before this complaint surfaced.

Chelsea got married in a fluffy Vera Wang wedding dress to her Jewish fiancé who has a sordid family history. I blogged about this "interfaith" wedding, the groom's incarcerated father, and the "mounds of chiffon" wedding dress that Vera Wang designed for her. These beginnings didn't give a cheerful start to their new life together. And her husband's background may tarnish her political future (but that seems to be nothing new, or necessary bad, for the Clinton family).

I wish her and her family life well, but running off to do feel-good television assignments (Breitbart more eloquently calls her first show: "A tale of elite privilege sharing the story of poverty") rather then taking care of her home, hearth and husband isn't going to help her much.