Guess who showed up on the campaign trail ready to do battle this week? Spoiler alert… it was Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea. This wasn’t some sort of charity event for the Clinton Foundation or a family reunion, but three full fledged campaign events in the state of New Hampshire where her mother is currently struggling in the polls. (WMUR)

Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton held events in Concord, Manchester and Portsmouth. While visiting Clinton headquarters in Salem, she mentioned the issues that are most important to her this election, including a woman’s right to choose, the chance for everyone to go to college and early childhood education — topics, she said, that are motivated by the fact that she is a mother now herself.

Well isn’t that nice. We should also stress that she wasn’t just visiting with the natives to talk up her mom. She was on the attack, taking on both Bernie Sanders and pretty much the entire GOP. (CBS News)

“I never thought we would be arguing about the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in the Democratic primary,” Clinton told Democrats in Manchester, one of three stops she made during her swing. She said Sanders would “dismantle” Obamacare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and Medicare — along with private insurance programs… “She also, unlike Sen. Sanders, has articulated how she’s going to pay for that proposal,” Chelsea Clinton said of Hillary Clinton’s plan. “Currently, there’s a $19 trillion gap, give or take, between what Sen. Sanders has proposed and how he’s articulated paying for those proposals,” Clinton said. “So that, to me, is troubling.”

I’m taking care to point out not only what Chelsea is saying, but who she is saying it about, and that’s for a reason. I’ve written virtually nothing about the woman for longer than I can remember because, with a few notable exceptions, Chelsea Clinton has stayed out of direct combat in politics. Sure, she’s done all sorts of things for the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation, but that’s ostensibly charity work. (Even though it obviously plays into her parents’ ongoing political activity.) As long as she mostly stuck to those types of activities and raised her family in New York, I was fine with treating her in accordance with the usual rules as they apply to politicians’ children and other relatives. Hands off. It’s no fault of hers who she was born to and she’s entitled to her privacy and the right to live her own life.

Now, however, the worm has turned. If she’s going to go out, put on the gloves and start taking shots then she has placed herself on the playing field in our American Game of Thrones. And like any other surrogate out there making the case for a candidate or policy, she is open to the same scrutiny as every other Democrat spokesperson on the trail. What do they bring to the table? What is their background which lends credence to their advocacy? In the case of Chelsea Clinton it’s an easy question to answer: nothing. A big, fat zero. Chelsea Clinton is a young woman of privilege with little or no accomplishments to her credit and no real substance to champion any cause. After high school she gained admission to a prestigious university (Stanford) which may well not have even given her a second look had her surname been anything else. She’s gotten a series of very well paying “jobs” in the media and with her parents’ foundation, none of which would have been possible without the strong arm of her mother and father. She had the world handed to her on a silver platter and really hasn’t had to work for a thing in her entire life. And now she wants to lecture all of the “hard working people” of America.

She did manage to hit some of her own strengths, however, when she talked about one of her mother’s primary qualifications to be president. It turns out that Hillary Clinton can sing Wheels on the Bus with the best of them.

I’d have been happy to continue to ignore Chelsea Clinton for the rest of her life if she’d stayed in her lane. But now she’s decided to dive into our pool at full speed. In the immortal words of John McClane, welcome to the party, pal.