Guest Column:

Driving Chelsea Clinton proves she's human

By Trevor Turner

Published Feb. 1, 2008

I had the fortunate privilege of driving Chelsea Clinton to all her Missouri events this past weekend. I learned a lot in the hours I spent driving the former first daughter around the great state of Missouri, but I think the most important thing I learned was that the Clintons are, in fact, human.

I’m not going to lie; I half expected Chelsea to be a politically motivated, robotic machine bent on Clinton supremacy. In the end, she turned out to be a typical 27-year-old whose mother just happens to be running for president of the United States.

I picked her up from her first event in Cape Girardeau where she had a Q-and-A in a local coffee shop. She had a media adviser and two personal assistants. When she got into the car I introduced myself and her first words to me were “I’m Chelsea, and I’m hungry.”

So we stopped at an Imo’s Pizza where I discovered her unhealthy love for salt. She got a salad with no dressing and began to put salt on it until it looked like a winter wonderland. So, even the former president’s daughter has bad eating habits.

On the way to her next event in St. Louis, she called her dad, Bill Clinton himself. It started out as a casual father-daughter conversation until she began to yell at him for his recent political faux pas. It was eerily similar to the way a typical daughter would yell at her dad for wearing tighty-whities in front of her friends.

When we arrived in Columbia, she asked me about MU and why I went there. I named a couple of reasons, but finally I had to be honest and say football.

“Oh, that’s a great reason to go,” she said. “When I lived in Arkansas I loved going to the Arkansas football games.”

“Oh, really,” I replied. “Well, we played Arkansas in the Cotton Bowl this year.”

“Yeah, that didn’t turn out so well,” she said with discontent.

“I thought it turned out great!”

She might be a Clinton, but I bleed black and gold.

After we left MU, we headed for Washington University for her next event. In the car she and her media adviser joked about her betting one of the Romney boys on the Super Bowl and then she and her assistants giggled about how good looking the Romneys were.

St. Louis was their last destination in Missouri. I finally dropped her off at the airport and headed back to good old MU. We left a good impression on her. She said we asked very good questions, but I think that can be expected from a school full of journalists.

I learned that though someone might be the former and possibly future president’s daughter, she is still human. No matter how powerful or prominent her parents might be, deep down they are just a regular family that loves and embarrasses each other.