She still can’t run with the big dogs.
Via Politico:
Chelsea Clinton has discovered something new since Inauguration Day: a spicy, sarcastic online personality.
In 2016, the uber-careful, wonky-like-her-mother former first daughter spent much of the presidential campaign trying not to make waves online. She tweeted about anodyne issues like elephants and hydration.
“Heartbreaking to see the elephant poaching crisis growing in Angola,” she tweeted last July, days before the Republican National Convention. “Another reason water is vital,” she wrote on Aug. 8, in the heat of the general election, linking to an article about water in Peru.
Her endorsement of H2O was retweeted just 84 times — which, given her more than 1.5 million followers, meant that it was effectively ignored.
But Hillary Clinton’s devastating defeat, coupled with the rise of President Donald Trump, has coaxed out a new Chelsea: provocative, punchier, and, for virtually the first time in her life, someone angling for attention in the political fray.
“What happened in Sweden Friday night? Did they catch the Bowling Green Massacre perpetrators?” she tweeted on Feb. 19, taking aim at both the president and his counselor, Kellyanne Conway, for fabricating terrorist attacks. The sarcastic post was retweeted more than 41,000 times.
Like the rest of the characters in her mother’s orbit, Chelsea Clinton is in a moment of transition, trying to figure out whether she’ll pursue her own political career — a move she hasn’t ruled out — or find a path outside the family business. “Lots of people are riled up and dialing it up,” said longtime Hillary Clinton confidant Philippe Reines. “Not as loyalists, but as citizens. I’m guessing that’s a big part of the motivation behind what she’s saying and how she’s saying it. She just also happens to be a Clinton.”[…]
She now also often retweets or interacts with journalists online — the very members of the fourth estate she ignored, looked through, and, for the most part, declined to speak with through her mother’s two presidential bids. She declined to comment for this article.[…]
Chelsea Clinton, meanwhile, is still serving as vice chair of the family foundation and promoting a new academic book, co-written with global health professor Devi Sridhar, called “Governing Global Health.” She is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
But she is also considering a future that is not necessarily tied so closely to her parents’ work. Her bio on Twitter identifies her as a mother, wife, advocate, author, teacher and New Yorker — everything but the label that most of the world identifies her with: daughter.