Chelsea Clinton does Garbo

Today in Vinton, Iowa, Chelsea Clinton refused to answer questions from a nine-year-old reporter for Scholastic News.

"I'm sorry, I don't talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately," Ms. Clinton said, "Even though I think you're cute."

AP political reporter Beth Fouhy noted that "an aide follows the former first daughter as she works the crowd, shushing reporters who approach her and try to ask any questions." The Clintons are "famously protective of their daughter's privacy," the AP reports, and "have taken pains to shield Chelsea from the harsh glare and rough edges of presidential politics."

She's twenty-seven years old.

She's a graduate of Stanford and Oxford.

She can't answer cream-puff little questions from political reporters in Iowa? From nine-year-olds?

She's a ditz, isn't she.

That's what they're hiding.

How would it look to the voters if Chelsea Clinton's head turned out to be emptier than a fifth of Jack Daniel's after a Sinatra concert? What would people say? "Well, we know she didn't inherit that brain from Bill, so...."

What would happen to Hillary Clinton's campaign if people stopped chanting about her intelligence and started listening to what she's saying?

On the assumption that the Clinton campaign only does what's best for the Clinton campaign, we can assume that it's best for the Clinton campaign to have a hard-and-fast rule that Chelsea Clinton does not talk to the press.

And that's not their only rule. "Onstage, Chelsea never speaks," the AP reports, "she stands next to her mother and applauds but utters not a single sentence and doesn't even say hello."

You know, Harpo Marx never spoke on stage again after a critic wrote that his performance was brilliant until he opened his mouth.

And Greta Garbo stopped talking to reporters after some early experiences with bad write-ups.

Is Chelsea Clinton the next Greta Garbo?

She might be.

The New York Times magazine published an obituary of Garbo in 1990 and quoted her biographer, John Bainbridge, who assessed her luminous quality this way:

"She may never have possessed a particle of intellectual power, but she had genius before the camera because she was guided by a secret, sublime, infallible instinct to do the right thing in the right way. So unerring was her instinct that it produced the illusion of a most subtle intelligence."

Hey, it's a compliment. Don't slash my tires.


Copyright 2007

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