ASKED which parent Chelsea Clinton most resembles, friends tick through the mother-daughter similarities. There is the habit of pre-empting questions by asking lots of them herself. The passionate interest in health care. The tendency to sound a bit scripted when talking about politics, even in private. The way both borrowed on family contacts to establish post-White House careers, but won over sceptical colleagues with their diligence and enthusiasm.
And if her mother, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, manages to become the first female president of the United States, Chelsea Clinton could be in a historic, head-spinning position of her own: the first child twice over.
She certainly brings expe
rience to the job. At age 12, she appeared in Bill Clinton's 'Man From Hope' video, testifying to his fatherly virtues. Clinton told viewers of his daughter's forgiving reaction to his admissions about marital transgressions.
When Hillary Clinton first ran for the Senate, her 20-year-old daughter criss-crossed New York state by her side. Now, at 27, Clinton is still clapping and beaming on her parents' behalf, and playing a more glamorous version of her lifelong role: model daughter.
"It's The Truman Show," said Jill Kargman, a friend of Chelsea's, citing the movie about a character whose entire life is a reality television programme. Like Truman, who eventually breaks free, Chelsea Clinton now has her own life: a hedge fund job, a serious boyfriend, a tight circle of friends and a permanent place on the guest list of the New York party circuit.
Lately, she has been able to have her celebrity and control it too, enjoying the perks with fewer of the drawbacks she used to suffer, like jokes about her looks and tabloid revelations about a supposedly cancelled wedding or secret honeymoon.
But all this could be about to change. With Hillary Clinton closing in on the Democratic nomination for president, campaign strategists are all too keenly aware of the value to the candidate's image of a loving daughter. Across much of America there is still a job to do to convince voters Hillary Clinton is a warm and affectionate human being, a regular 'mom'.
Crucially, Chelsea also helps people come to a better understanding of the enigmatic but enduring relationship between Hillary and Bill - an unspoken subtext to the senator's entire campaign.
"I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I'd believed him at all," Hillary wrote in her autobiography Living History, admitting she wasn't sure her marriage would survive. When the revelations broke, she, Bill and Chelsea took off for Martha's Vineyard with Buddy the dog in tow. The dog seemed to be the only member of the family willing to interact with Bill.
Yet soon afterwards Chelsea was photographed hand in hand with her parents, almost as if she was physically holding them together. She makes the Clinton family credible, and that in America is important.
According to her mother's memoirs, Chelsea was present when her father and his advisers debated how to acknowledge his affair with Monica Lewinsky to the nation. This is a young woman who has never in the past been able to separate family and politics, and will be unable to do so in the future.
Chelsea will have to decide soon whether to surrender some of her privacy to help her mother gain the ultimate political prize - the irony being that it would effectively end the daughter's ability to live a near-normal life.
So far, Chelsea is more a character than a presence in the campaign, which seeks to portray Senator Clinton as a strong yet nurturing force, a friend to women and children and a symbol of progress from one generation to the next. Voters hear stories about Chelsea's childhood Christmas ornaments, her fondness for the children's book Goodnight Moon, even her crib.
But campaign officials will not give any clues when - or even if - Chelsea will appear on the trail. "Even though President and Senator Clinton are public figures, their daughter is not," Howard Wolfson, the campaign spokesman, said in a statement. "While Chelsea Clinton has attended events for her mom and will be supporting her parents in their political and philanthropic endeavours, she will continue to focus on her own professional and personal interests as a private person."
Chelsea has her own life. She began college interested in medicine, which would have taken her away from her parents' orbit, into long years of hospital training. Instead, after graduating with honours from Stanford University in June 2001, she enrolled at Oxford University, which her father had attended as a Rhodes scholar. She arrived just after September 11, 2001, and quickly banded with other Americans traumatised by the attacks.
Clinton shared her answer in an earnest essay a few months later in Talk magazine: "For most young Americans I know, 'serving' in the broadest sense now seems like the only thing to do," she wrote. "Is banking what's important right now?"
But after Oxford, Chelsea signed up with McKinsey, a consulting company known as an elite business training corps. She was the youngest in her class, hired at the same rank as those with MBA degrees.
Last autumn she moved on, taking a job analysing investments at Avenue Capital, a hedge fund run by Marc Lasry, a loyal donor to Democratic causes generally, and Clinton-related ones specifically. The company invests its $18bn in the debt of troubled businesses.
From this base, she likes to party - up to a point. At a benefit last month for the School of American Ballet, on whose board she serves, Clinton seemed as hardworking as the other attendees did festive. Most of the women her age wore bright gowns and bare skin, but Clinton wore a dark trouser suit, her hair smoothed and fastened back. She later slipped out before the performance ended, telling friends she had to return to her computer.
Clinton seems acutely aware that others are always observing her; classmates at Stanford noticed that she was always in full make-up, as if she expected to be photographed at any moment. More recently, she exercised with a personal trainer who specialises in beauty pageant contestants.
Chelsea never had a sibling to share or dilute the pressures on her, but now has a partner whose life is an uncanny mirror of her own. Marc Mezvinsky, who works at Goldman Sachs in New York, is also the child of two politician parents, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky and Edward Mezvinsky, both former members of Congress. And Marc Mezvinsky survived a humiliating parental scandal, when his father pleaded guilty in 2002 to swindling dozens of investors out of $10m.
If her mother becomes president, Clinton's role at the White House, or lack thereof, could be a clue to her own ambitions. She is biding her time, say friends, who toss out possibilities: A life in finance? The Clinton Foundation, which could pass from one generation to the next? Or, would Clinton run for office herself?
To the public, Clinton has given just the barest hint of that sort of impulse. In her essay about September 11, she wrote that she felt "a new urgency to play a part in America's future". She did not know where life would take her, she said, but one thing was certain. "I will somehow serve my country," she promised. In the meantime there is the small matter of making her mother US president.
Troublesome kids
JENNA AND BARBARA BUSH The daughters, left, of President George W Bush had a taste for the hard stuff while teenagers during their father's first term in the White House. In Austin, Texas, in May 2001, both were charged with a misdemeanour of being a minor in possession of alcohol, with Jenna facing a further charge of attempting to use a fake ID to purchase booze.
EUAN BLAIR In 2000, aged 16, the eldest son of Tony Blair was found by police in Leicester Square, drunk and incapable, having spent the night celebrating the completion of his GCSEs. Taken to a police station, Euan, left, gave a false name, an old address and a false date of birth. His father had recently introduced tough new measures to deal with anti-social behaviour by troublesome youths.
AL GORE III The son of former US vice-president Al Gore last week pleaded guilty to two charges of drug possession, two misdemeanour counts of drug possession without a prescription and one misdemeanour count of marijuana possession, after being stopped by police when driving at 100mph. Gore Jnr subsequently announced his intention to go into rehab.
CHARLES ADAMS A son of John Adams, America's second president (1797-1801), Charles was almost kicked out of Harvard for getting drunk and running naked through the campus. Later, he descended into alcoholism, losing thousands of dollars in shady land-speculation schemes and was rejected by his father, who considered him morally deficient and once referred to him as "a madman possessed of the devil".
