What to Expect When a Clinton Is Expecting
Here is what to expect now that Chelsea Clinton is expecting: Her child, due in the fall, will arrive just months before Hillary Clinton may announce her next run for president. Even non-famous women find that when they are pregnant, “your body becomes a public object,” as Julia Cheiffetz, a book editor and new mother in Brooklyn, put it. So imagine what could happen to Ms. Clinton, whose entry into motherhood could coincide with her family’s kickoff of a billion-dollar campaign in which biography and family are central strategic assets. Most pregnant women make a birth plan for when they go into labor: what to pack, how to get to the hospital. Chelsea Clinton’s arrangements might involve disguises, private security consultants and public relations strategy. . .
Mothers can be especially potent on the political stage. Kissing a stranger’s baby is one thing; cradling your own bundle of innocence and authenticity is another. Before Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy flamed out, she dazzled audiences by campaigning with her baby in her arms. (The pregnancy of her daughter, Bristol Palin, turned into a messier drama.)
On Wednesday night at a Fortune magazine event in New York, Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, charmed female executives by contrasting the toughness of her day job — negotiating with China and Russia on matters like Syria — with tenderness of her other job, raising her two young children.
She occasionally misses a call from President Obama while bathing her children, she said, and she tries to tell her 5-year-old the truth about her work. “One of [my son’s] very dear friends was trying to take the toys he was playing with and my son said — and I never guessed he would be capable of this — ‘You’re just like Putin!' ” she said, taking a whack at the Russian leader from an unexpected angle. The audience howled in appreciation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/us/politics/what-to-expect-when-a-clinton-is-expecting.html?hp
