Hillary Clinton is still riffing off her claim that she and Bill aren’t really that rich, and now daughter Chelsea is also insisting she is so selfless that she just can’t dredge up enough interest to “care” about money.
Chelsea recently tried to justify her jumping from job to job instead of choosing a career and sticking with it. It turns out, she says, that she just doesn’t much care about making money.
“I’ve tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents,” Chelsea told the UK Telegraph on June 22. “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.”
So, instead of working in fields where she could make a lot of money, Chelsea has claimed she has decided to make a career out of working for her parents’ charitable organization the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
The Clinton progeny said that she just couldn’t get into all those other careers she dipped her privileged toes into. She couldn’t find enough interest in her hedge fund work, didn’t care about her consulting job, is noncommittal about her “journalism” career, and just isn’t interested in working in academia.
Chelsea was fortunate to find so many jobs to try out at her young age, certainly. But as the New York Daily News said in the understatement of the year, “The Clinton name likely opened doors for the political heiress.”
It is worth noting that, despite not putting in the years to earn it, Chelsea seemed to have landed in a top position in nearly every “career” she dabbled in before migrating to the Foundation.
Recently, for instance, it was reported that, while most reporters are lucky to earn as much per year, Chelsea’s “journalism” career netted her $50,000 every month. And all this even though she hasn’t been on the air one time in over four months.
Her junior reporter salary adds up to whopping $600,000 a year! That would be enough to hire up to 12 other journalists.
But Chelsea seems to sense that most people imagine she has made her way in life thus far by trading on her name instead of her skills.
So, with her work at the Foundation, Chelsea told the British paper that she hopes that over time “I preempt and erase whatever expectations people have of me not having a good work ethic, or not being smart, or not being motivated.”
As Chelsea is trying to cajole the country into believing she is selfless with her time working for the Foundation and just doesn’t care about making money, mother Hillary is also trying to make America believe that she isn’t really a rich person.
In several appearances this month Hillary, who is expected to run for the Democrat nomination for president in 2016, has tried to claim that she and Bill aren’t as rich as most people assume. Her claims have raised a lot of eyebrows and caused incredulity throughout the media.
Still, Hillary is persisting with the claim. Most recently, Hillary claimed that making $100 million does not make her “truly well off.”
Many commentators are sure that this is all part of a campaign by Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea to remake themselves as “regular folks” so Hillary can make a stab at a populist campaign for president. But thus far it seems to be an entirely tone deaf attempt.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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