The Clinton/Gore Kiddie Kops

As the blogosphere picks up with talk of David Shuster's remark about "pimped out" Chelsea Clinton, something should be made clear. The media spent the 1990s using Chelsea and Gore kids to improve the public image of the Clintons and the Gores. When someone (like Al Gore III) misbehaved by speeding at 90 MPH, the media covered up. But they used young Al to burnish old Al for all those high school football games he attended as a devoted dad. See this NRO piece from 2000.

It's still happening now, with Chelsea used routinely to warm up Hillary's ice-queen image. Last August, Brent Bozell wrote up a particularly embarrassing piece from Jodi Kantor in The New York Times, treating Chelsea Clinton as, well, a nearly silent American Idol. "We’re told that 'people seem delighted just to watch her lips move and hear sound emerge.' As Kantor described her Jewish boyfriend, she identifies Chelsea as 'a Christmas-cookie-baking, churchgoing Methodist.'”

Shuster was either rude or displaying his affinity for hip-hop lingo by suggesting Chelsea was "pimped out." But there is no question that the liberal media has enthusiastically joined the Clintons in puffing up Chelsea as someone who makes her parents look more appealing -- almost to the point where you're expecting them to paint cartoon songbirds around her head.

UPDATE: There's one more, a 2001 Bozell column right after the media played up the 19-year-old Bush twins being arrested for drinking in Austin, Bush's Kids vs. Gore's Kids.