Clintons Send Chelsea Off To The Gay Bars

Here's something most candidates don't normally hear from the crowd on the campaign trail:

"We love your highlights!"

"You're gorgeous, baby!"

That, according to WaPo poli-blog, The Trail, is what greeted Chelsea Clinton as she hit the late night gay bar scene in Philadelphia (can you say "brotherly love?") last night.

What's Chelsea doing hanging out in gay bars? Lest rumors fly:

Hillary Clinton's big supporter in the state, Gov. Ed Rendell, always heads to four or five of the most popular of them before elections, and he invited the former first daughter along for the trip.

Sounds like pandering to special interest voters to me.

It's handy having a daughter in her 20s so that Bill and Hil don't have to take campaign assignments like this themselves:

A crowd of more than two dozen followed Clinton from Tavern to Woodies, a couple of blocks down the street. After being introduced by Rendell, Clinton gave a brief speech to the mostly male crowd, which briefly stopped dancing and checking out the dancers standing on tables (and wearing only briefs) to listen to her.

Her response to beefy men in briefs?

"I'm so excited to be here!"

Gays are an audience like any other. Heck, the other day, the director of the Desert Chapter of our Building Industry Association (hardly a liberal bunch) was flaunting his new ad, showing two men cuddling and talking about buying a new house.

"We can't ignore the gay market," he said. "A lot of our electeds are gay and we really can't ignore them."

But I do take issue at the choice of Chelsea's venue. There are plenty of places to pander to the gay vote besides gay bars on a Friday night: universities, churches, gay political clubs. In sending their daughter out to the gay bars, the Clintons were manipulative, exploitative ... and Clintonian, as in:

“I grabbed her ass,” one young woman exclaimed to her friends after snapping a picture with her arm around the former first daughter. (MSNBC)

I mean, really! Haven't they just turned their daughter into a campaign slut? (Albiet an effective one, as this morning Google cranks out 22,800 hits for "Chelsea gay bar crawl.")

As I click "Publish Post," make that 22,801.

hat-tip: memeorandum