Hillary Clinton’s traveling assistant and ‘body person’ Huma Abedin is profiled in the current Vogue (thanks, Aseem). The New York Observer profiled her in April:

The back story, as it were, begins 32 years ago in Kalamazoo, Mich., where Ms. Abedin… lived until the age of 2. Her family then relocated to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she lived until returning to the States for college. She attended George Washington University. Her father, who died when she was 17, was an Islamic and Middle Eastern scholar of Indian decent. He founded his own institute devoted to Western-Eastern and interfaith understanding and reconciliation and published a journal focusing on Muslim minorities living in the diaspora. Her mother, a renowned professor in Saudi Arabia, is Pakistani…

When she comes to New York, she stays with her sister, who has an apartment in Manhattan… She has no children and has never been married. She’s single… the Clintons’ longtime attorney said that in 11 years of knowing her, he has never seen her wear the same outfit twice. [Link]

… Huma’s special friend John Cusack [is someone] she “baby-sat” on a Clinton-organized celebrity trip to Saudi Arabia… [Link]

… she has been close with actor John Cusack and Lance Armstrong. [Link]

Village Voice chief gossip Michael Musto speculates the fashion spread and recital of Abedin’s dating history are designed to inoculate Clinton II against a Southern strategy-style smear campaign:

… whisper campaigns are claiming that Hillary Clinton is Gayle King-ing her aide de camp, the glamorous Huma Abedin, an Indian/Pakistani goddess from Kalamazoo, Michigan. In other words, Hillary may be putting Huma out there in the press and purposely making her more visible as a pre-emptive strike that amounts to her hiding in plain sight. This way, no Republican can later say, “Who is this gorgeous babe who spends so much intimate time with Hillary that the Observer called her Hill’s ‘body person’?

… suddenly, Huma–a sort of Muslim Salma Hayek–has that spread in Vogue and the accompanying write-up notes that she “oversees every minute of Senator Clinton’s day…” I told one Pines Democrat the Hillary/Huma scenario and he deadpanned, “That’s a step up from Donna Shalala…” [Link]

Abedin’s recent press outing would been done with Hillary’s consent. The first rule of a press wrangled: never get more press than your client. Indeed, Abedin declined to be interviewed by the Observer earlier this year.

Related posts: Obama outro (updated), Hillary and Indira (updated)