Rudy Giuliani's kids may not be on the trail with him this time around (the above images feature son Andrew at Giuliani's mayoral inauguration in 1994), but the presence of his daughter Caroline, Obama-curious Harvard '11, was felt at a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire yesterday.  A New Hampshire woman asked how the ex-mayor could expect voters' support when he did not even have the support of his children.  The Associated Press reports,

"I love my family very, very much and will do anything for them. There are complexities in every family in America," Giuliani said calmly and quietly. "The best thing I can say is kind of, 'Leave my family alone, just like I'll leave your family alone.'"

This from the guy who said he'd bring his wife to cabinet meetings.  Judith Nathan aside, the question of how much scrutiny politicians' children deserve -- or ought to be shielded from -- remains hotly contested.  Caroline's Facebook affiliations seem relatively benign to us; but what about Antonio Villaraigosa Jr. bragging about his powers of persuasion with the LAPD?  (Dad Antonio Sr. is the mayor of LA)  Are there times when the sins of the child reflect on the father?  And what value do the "sins" of a teenager talking big on the internet have, anyway? 

And what about poor Chelsea Clinton, who had the terrible misfortune of going through puberty while her dad was in the White House?!  Let's set a ground rule:  Kids with braces should be off-limits.  --MAUREEN O'CONNOR

Lucy Morrow Caldwell.

Just yesterday, this name elicited a firestorm across teh_interwebs when Slate ran a "report" showing that Rudy Giuliani's 17-year-old daughter Caroline, Harvard '11, was a de facto member of the "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" Facebook group.

Links were exchanged, hatred spewed forth like only the 'Net can provide and backlash -- yes, backlash -- ensued, offering up the idea that Ms. Caldwell turned a blind eye to news integrity and unleashed this bit of "breaking news" on the world.

Did Lucy Morrow Caldwell invent breaking news for her own benefit?

According to multiple sources, she just may have. Why? Let us ask you this: Is the joining of a Facebook group by a minor who is not eligible to vote truly a reason to get CNN's news ticker all ticked-off?

For the record, we at IvyGate think Caldwell's motives are suspect. After all, how long was Giuliani a part of that group? Was it breaking just because someone who is not one of her friends on Facebook noticed? Remember -- the noose-tightening line in Caldwell's piece is that she removed herself from the group at an otherwise-uncollegiate-for-the-summer 6:01 a.m. But where was the news when she originally had joined it?

We're actually on the side of Insider Chatter on this one:

If Slate's Lucy Morrow Caldwell is aware of corporate owner WP's Pentagon Papers and Watergate investigative heritage, it is NOT evident in her "undercover" Facebook reporting. Howard Kurtz is billed as the Washington Post media critic, but he is content to regurgitate a college intern's inept public posting of a fellow Facebooker's profile."

Ouch, and that's coming from an editor who's actually been billed as "Howard Kurtz, Jr."

Do we really care about Caroline Giuliani's political views? Here's a little justification to how little this matters for her, thanks to a blistering New York profile of Caroline's stepmother Judith:

When I ran into Rudy at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner in late April, he told me Judith skipped the event because "she's up taking care of our daughter [Whitney] at Skidmore." The locution "our daughter" was hardly calculated to repair his frayed relations with the biological children he shares with [Donna] Hanover, especially 17-year-old Trinity-prep-school senior Caroline, who uses Donna's surname and reportedly didn't bother telling him when she was accepted recently by Harvard. ("In the next few months, Rudy really has to repair his relationships with Andrew and Caroline," says a Republican strategist. "He can't be the Republican nominee and have his kids estranged from him. That ain't gonna cut it.")"

So when the scrutiny comes down on the younger, collegiate Giuliani's profile, which reveals a "liberal" slant -- the most popular of political views on Harvard profiles, and for that matter, Facebook in general -- IvyGate smells some agenda-setting.

Allow us to take a look at the even-handed journalistic history of one Ms. Lucy Morrow (that's with an "o", not a "u", as in Edward R.) Caldwell:

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