Nana for President: could becoming a grandmother ease Hillary Clinton's path to the White House?

• Author: Edwards, Haley Sweetland
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

"... such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) ... I shall become the seat of the Government of the United States"

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

In September, Chelsea Clinton and her husband of four years, Marc Mezvinsky, announced that they are hoping to become parents soon. "We want, God willing, to start a family, so we decided we were going to make 2014 the Year of the Baby," said Chelsea, who turned thirty-four this year, during an interview with Glamour magazine.

"And please," the former first daughter added, "call my mother and tell her that. She asks us about it every single day."

That Hillary is in the mood for grandchildren shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who is, or who knows, the mother of a married thirtysomething. It's like an alarm goes off in a mother's brain at a certain age: Must. Have. Grandbahy. And it's not just the moms. Bill, for his part, has also been beating the Grandkid Drum since 2010, when he coyly mentioned at an AIDS conference in Vienna that he'd like to live long enough to see his own grandchildren. A few months later, on the David Letterman show, he told the host that his wife couldn't have been happier that his daughter was tying the knot. "Hillary," he drawled, "wants to be a grandmother more than she wanted to be president."

Here's hoping Hillary--and Chelsea, Marc, and Bill, too--get what they want. Babies are a beautiful thing. But here's the truth of it: in the strange world of campaign politics, where the square-jawed Romney brood and cardigan-clad Obama girls become national shorthand for a candidate's private life, the arrival of the first Clinton grandchild will not just be a beautiful thing; it'll be a political thing, too. The presumptive Democratic candidate will suddenly have a new role she needs to master: grandmother. And in myriad ways that no male candidate would be, she will be judged, for good or ill, by how well she performs it.

The most obvious risk to her new role is that it will inevitably highlight her age, a vulnerability some conservatives have already begun exploiting. (At sixty-six, Hillary is "not particularly old for a man," Washington Times columnist Wes Pruden generously observed last year, but "a woman in public life is getting past her sell-by date.") She will also likely provoke a national water-cooler debate, as no male candidate would, over whether she is too involved in her grandchild's life, or, more likely, not involved enough--"How can she have...