Chelsea Clinton: Money Ain't a Thing
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Chelsea Clinton, a woman who was paid $600,000 per year by a television network just to be named "Chelsea Clinton," has been doing some soul-searching. "I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn't," she says. "That wasn't the metric of success I wanted in my life."
That quote, by the way, is Chelsea's explanation of why she left her earlier job at a hedge fund. The $600K pseudojournalism job reporting on Nice Celebrities Who Are Good came after that. This is all from a profile of Clinton in the The Telegraph this weekend, which contains enough gobsmackingly un-self-aware pontification to prove once and for all that Chelsea Clinton—who may be bright, capable, and politically savvy—is also a clueless nepotism beneficiary of the first order.
"I will just always work harder [than anybody else] and hopefully perform better," says Chelsea Clinton, who lives with her hedge fund manager husband in a $10 million apartment.
Chelsea Clinton has worked at McKinsey, and at a hedge fund, and at NBC News, and now at the Clinton Global Initiative foundation. What do all of these jobs have in common? They are highly lucrative; they are extremely competitive; and Chelsea Clinton got each and every one of them because of her last name. To deny this simple fact is to deny reality. Even Chelsea Clinton would not (or should not) deny it. The problem with nepotism of this sort is not that the kids who benefit from it are necessarily incapable of doing the highly desirable, lucrative, and influential jobs that they get; it is that these highly desirable, lucrative, and influential jobs are not equally accessible for the non-celebukids of the world. Nepotism is unfair. It is undemocratic. It is unAmerican. To the degree that it persists, the notion of "equal opportunity" or "meritocracy" is a joke. For the daughter of the possible presidential candidate from the Democratic Party, this is not a small philosophical concern. It must, at minimum, be acknowledged, and actively fought against.
It is easy to not care about money when you are already a multimillionaire.
Chelsea Clinton "especially wants the foundation to address concerns that have 'existed too long in the shadows, that historically have made people uncomfortable'," the Telegraph writes. Admirable. The first concern she should address—though it may make her uncomfortable—is nepotism.
[And after that, perhaps, the incompatibility of political dynasties with a healthy democracy. Photo: Getty]