Media access to Chelsea’s inner circle is meticulously managed. Asked even the most basic questions, her friends and colleagues tread cautiously. At times, their stories sound eerily similar, right down to the phrasing. (Chelsea is so caring and devoted, two different women told me, that she makes you wonder whether you are, perhaps, her only friend.) No one talks out of school, in some cases because they’re loyal, in others because they fear being cast into the wilderness by the entire clan—which, as more than one person reminded me, includes the woman who may well be the next president of the United States.

The Milwaukee reporters lob questions of the sort that Chelsea encounters dozens of times a week—about Bernie Sanders, for example, and Latino voters. Then one intrepid young man tries a different approach. Noting that if Hillary is elected, the nation will have a first gentleman rather than a first lady, he asks, “Do you think your mother will have you as a stand-in hostess in that position?”

It’s an odd question, and Chelsea is clearly itching to smack it down. She has a job in New York, she reminds him, and a family of her own. (Maybe the guy missed all the tummy patting?) At a previous campaign stop, she says, someone asked whether she planned to move back into her old room in the East Wing. Chelsea seems both amused and exasperated by the notion. While she hopes to have the privilege of visiting her mother in the White House, she explains, that is as far as she intends to go. “My life,” she says, “will remain in New York.”

Such is the paradox of being Chelsea Clinton. The once and possibly future first daughter has always been mature and accomplished beyond her years. Now 36, she has a child at home and another on the way, three advanced degrees, one book to her name, and a second coming next year. She plays a high-profile role as vice chair of the family’s global philanthropic foundation. On the side, she teaches, writes, gives speeches, and sits on corporate and nonprofit boards.

Yet Chelsea remains in the public mind an appendage of her world-famous parents, always available to fulfill her duties as the consummate political daughter. It’s as if she’s still the curly-haired teenager who walked hand in hand with her mom and dad across the White House lawn, literally and figuratively holding the family together, after Bill’s televised admission of bad behavior with Monica Lewinsky.

Chelsea was 18 years old and a freshman at Stanford when the scandal engulfed her father’s presidency. The photos from the day after his mea culpa, August 18, 1998, are by far the most famous ever taken of her. No longer the gawky adolescent target of Saturday Night Live jokes but not yet her polished-to-perfection adult self, she radiated both stability and vulnerability.