Chelsea Clinton hits the trail

WINTERSET, Iowa – Just as mega-star Oprah Winfrey was about to woo thousands of people across three states to vote for Barack Obama, his main rival, Hillary Clinton, brought a surprise guest to the campaign trail today – her daughter Chelsea.

It is the first time that the famous first daughter has been seen anywhere in public campaigning for her mother’s presidential bid. She joined her grandmother, Dorothy Rodham, who also showed up for the first time during the race last night in Des Moines.

Chelsea Clinton, 27, wore a broad – if somewhat frozen – smile and waved briefly as her mother introduced her to 75 people shivering in an unheated airport hanger here. After a few minutes on stage, she led her grandmother to sit down while the New York senator spoke about her plans for care for the elderly.

Encouraging voters to bring a “buddy” to the Jan 3. caucuses, Hillary Clinton called her mother and daughter her buddies.

“This has got to be multigenerational, we all have to work together,” Hillary Clinton said, referring to the challenges the country faces.

Although the Clinton family has carefully guarded Chelsea’s privacy over the years, she appeared frequently on the trail when her mother ran for the Senate in 2000. So political observers have been speculating about whether she would be deployed as a secret weapon when Hillary Clinton hit a bump in the road or when her image needed extra humanizing.

This weekend, the candidate could use a little of both, as polls increasingly suggest that her prospects for winning the first-in-the-nation caucus are shaky, and as Winfrey stepped in for Obama as perhaps the most valuable celebrity endorsement in America.

But the Clinton campaign kept Chelsea’s visit to Iowa a secret and did not try to replicate the glitz of Oprah’s stadium appearances before thousands of people. Chelsea Cltinon showed up first this morning at a Des Moines deli, then hit the road to two campaign stops. The first, here in rural Madison County, was a particularly modest Clinton campaign event with a small crowd in a tiny, barebones airport with just a few propeller planes outside.

The daughter, who works at a hedge fund in New York, didn’t speak publicly but shook hands and chatted with voters.

“Is there anything I can tell you that would put you over the edge for my mom?” she asked a woman in Des Moines who called herself undecided.

Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said Chelsea’s Iowa visit was scheduled based on her other time-commitments, not in response to Winfrey’s campaign swing. He said she would appear again as her schedule permits.

“She’s excited to get out and see Iowa and spend some time with her mom,” Carson said. “She’s a very busy woman with a very time consuming job.”