In the latest White House sex scandal, there is no subject off-limits, no detail too lurid to examine in graphic detail. But there is one name that causes even the most acerbic pundits to stop and stammer in embarrassed silence: Chelsea Clinton.
"I think everyone feels the worst for her," Kathie Lee Gifford, a television personality, said on air. It is the thought of 17-year-old Chelsea that elevates this scandal from dirty farce to a painful, real-life ordeal. No one, however he or she feels about the president, can forget that he is also the father of a teenage girl who adores him.
Jesse Jackson was invited to the White House to watch the Super Bowl with the Clintons and a few Cabinet members on Sunday and spoke by phone for more than 15 minutes with the president's daughter, at college in California.
"She has an inner strength and a maturity that is beyond her years," Jackson told the Associated Press. "Their family unit is very strong. She grew up in the house of a governor and a president. She was born and bred in the heat of battle. That contributed mightily to her maturity."
"She's fine," said Ms Marsha Berry, a spokeswoman for the first lady.
From behind the thick veil of privacy that has always surrounded Chelsea, the reports are that she is "very, very strong" and handling the latest news reports surprisingly well. Her father called her last week to say the allegations weren't true; his daughter responded by asking what she could do to help. She's been "very supportive", a source said.
"I hear she's doing fine," said a family friend. "Hillary and Chelsea are really tough."
For the moment, her life is proceeding as normally as possible. She is attending her second quarter of freshman classes at Stanford University and was not in Washington for the State of the Union address last night.
She will be 18 on February 27th. University officials, by long-standing policy, do not give out any information on individual students, but Chelsea has been spotted on campus, seemingly unfazed by the handful of camera crews.
There has been talk on campus, as there has been in every other place in America, about Monica Lewinsky and the sensational allegations of her relationship with the president. The student paper, the Stanford Daily, has run daily reports.
But there are no jokes, no snickering giggles among the students, said Jesse Oxfeld, a former columnist for the paper. "Any conversation ends with the disclaimer: "Wow. This really must be awful for Chelsea."
Hearing awful things about your parents is part of the territory for any politician's child. But few other political offspring have been so well prepared to deal with the slings and arrows of public life.
Chelsea was always a first daughter - there were only two years, when she was very young, when her father wasn't governor or president. Her parents trained her early on to expect people to say mean things about her dad.
When she was only six, her parents prepared her for a re-election campaign by explaining that people would say terrible things, even lie, in order to win. The Clinton family then took turns in mock debates, attacking and defending as if they were on the campaign trail.
"Our role-playing helped Chelsea to experience, in the privacy of our home, the feelings of any person who sees someone she loves being personally attacked," writes Hillary Clinton in her book, It Takes a Village. "As we continued the exercise over a few dinners, she gradually gained mastery over her emotions and some insight into the situations that might arise . . . We had tried to give her the tools to deal with the hurt from which we could not shield her, and we had to hope that as a resilient young woman, she would know how to use them."
By all accounts, the lessons were well learned. "I would assume both she and her mother are doing very, very well," said Charles Figley, a Florida psychologist who studies the children of politicians. The Clinton women, he says, are undoubtedly ready to defend the presidency from yet another attack. "Rather than personalising it, you are protecting the assets of the company, in effect. Rather than "I'm defending my father," it's, "I'm defending the presidency."
Considering the enormous pressures of being the only child of the president, Chelsea Clinton has lived a remarkably normal life. Her mother sought advice from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on bringing up a White House child and was told privacy was the critical factor.
Chelsea moved to Washington when she was a gawky 13 and left last autumn a serious, graceful, poised and smart young woman. She managed to get through her teenage years without any embarrassing incidents - the only Clinton family member with an unblemished reputation.
Through it all, she has remained close to both her parents. The three genuinely enjoy one another's company, say close friends. Clinton is a doting and devoted father; Chelsea's kindness and conscience, the president has told friends, outshine even her intelligence. She is too smart not to understand the gravity of the accusations against her father but too level-headed, say friends, to let them interfere with her life.