For instance: Her problems about mean coverage or cruel reporters are nothing, she says. "Meeting people on the road who have real problems, you know, sort of makes me think that it would be really self-indulgent to get in a tizzy about some bad quote or analysis," she says. "Because the truth is, it is about, you know, getting a prescription drug benefit, or making daycare more affordable, or keeping abortion legal. Those are real things. So to have a silly celebrity problem doesn't seem right."

When I ask about her reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she gives me an answer that is almost word for word what she told the New York Observer a full year before.

"It was difficult and disappointing. Really. I felt like a lot of Americans did." To the Observer: "It was difficult and, uh, disappointing, I think just like it was for a lot of Americans."

Then again, she's been at this for a while -- and it was much worse in the days when her mom was crusading to put warning labels on record albums.

"That was the most severe experience that I had," she says. "Even now, it doesn't compare. Because I was 14 and I really wanted to be cool.

"How she was described at the time was so different from how she is as a person, so I kind of felt like, OK, you can't put too much stock in that. Also I kind of admired the way she just stuck to what she wanted to do without being too swayed by that criticism," she says. "And then in the long run, a lot of the culture came around to her concerns, or at least her approach. That experience definitely is, like, part of the prism through which I manage the emotional stuff from the campaign."

But then there are other times when she's refreshingly open. I ask about living in a universe where the common embarrassment any of us feel when our parents act like dorks in front of our friends is magnified a hundredfold and projected onto an IMAX screen, with THX sound. The world is listening.

The celebrated kiss between her folks at the Democratic Convention didn't cause her any mortification, because she's "just so used to that. That's just how they are, and I gave up on being embarrassed about that a long time ago."

But is she ever embarrassed? Does she ever see her dad and say, 'Oh, God, Dad, why are you wearing pleated khakis?'"

She laughs. Then, suddenly, she turns to mock concern. "Does my dad run around in pleated khakis?" Yes, I tell her, he certainly does.

"You know, I just want him to be himself," she says. "Seriously. It would be so much worse if he was trying to be cool or whatever."

What about all the reports about his constant reinventions? "I have no idea what they're talking about," she says. "Honestly, I really don't." She and her mom helped outfit him in the fabled earth-toned look, she allows, "but it didn't seem that dramatic at the time. He looked great in the tan suit in the store."

Combined with whatever blindness her love for her father causes her, however, she is not immune to his sheer dadlike-dorkiness. "I get embarrassed when my parents dance, OK?" she admits. "I remember feeling embarrassed when my dad was campaigning for president in New York in 1988, he went to a schoolyard in, like, the Bronx or something to play pickup basketball with a group of teenage boys there. Yeah, I felt really embarrassed at the time. ... It's totally the same feeling as being dropped off at the eighth grade prom, it's like 'No -- leave me a block from here.'"

"But there have been enough totally surreal moments, when you're like, 'Oh my God, my mom is talking to Jerry Garcia.' There have been so many moments like that, I've just kind of gotten over it," she says. "'Oh, no, my mom is going to debate Ice-T on national television, I'm really embarrassed.' I liked Ice-T. I was a fan."

Come on. How much of a fan of Ice-T could she possibly have been?

"I knew all the words to 'Colors,'" she insists. To prove her point, she breaks into the rap:

"'I am a nightmare walking, psychopath talking/king of the jungle, just a gangster stalking/Living life like a firecracker, quick is my fuse/Then dead as a deathpack the colors I choose,'" she raps, sort of. "I mean, the whole thing."

To be fair, I should say, for a lily-white senator's daughter who went to the National Cathedral High School, Harvard University and Columbia Law School, her rapping isn't terrible.

But she's become hardened to media attacks. She even insists that the world is better off with "Saturday Night Live" and others mocking her parents -- which, I tell her, they will doubtlessly do, with cruel abandon, when the new season begins. Isn't she worried about what they might say about her poor mother -- she of the battles with depression, weight and the spotlight?

"I think that it would be the nation's loss if we didn't have comedians imitating politicians and their goings-on," she insists. Likewise, she says she doesn't mind protesters at all.

But doesn't it get exhausting -- and infuriating -- after a while? I mean, she's not the one running for office. I mention how conservative pundits attacked her dad after he provided a guest voice on Fox's "Futurama" -- where her younger sister, Kristin, is a writer -- which they labeled a "violent" and "crude" TV show.

"Occasionally I find that sometimes you get the best news from Algore.com" -- the campaign's Web site -- she jokes. (Or at least I hope she's joking.) "Sometimes that's where you gotta go."

Her in-laws occasionally keep her grounded, she says. The Schiffs are generations-old Republicans. Drew's parents "give me a funny commentary on this stuff," she says. After her father met secretly with the Rev. Al Sharpton at her Upper East Side duplex, her in-laws weighed in.

I guess they're not big fans of the Rev. Sharpton, I say.

"No, they're not," she replies.

Still, the resulting negative stories about Sharpton's secret meeting with her dad, in her duplex, didn't bother her too much.

"The only thing that makes me mad is when people say there's nothing at stake in this election, or there's no difference between the two major candidates," she says.

Embodying her private and public worlds are her mom and dad, of course. Karenna says she goes back and forth between reading everything written about herself and her dad, and reading nothing, which makes sense.

Her father, after all, reads everything ever written about him -- or any other subject, really -- inhaling words like they were nitrous oxide in a dentist's office.

Her mother does the complete opposite, avoiding almost anything ever written about her family. She hasn't got time for the pain.

"She never reads the profiles of her, she rarely reads stuff about my dad, and that's the way she handles it," Schiff says. "For me, I generally have read everything. I may change that because it's getting to a point now that the news cycle moves so fast and to get caught up is not necessarily the best thing when you know the issues that matter and what you want to say."

The clear point: "Getting caught up" in an unpleasant story or a snarky profile expends emotional energy that, in these last eight weeks, she doesn't have time for.

Will she read this piece I'm working on right now? The one she's missing some of her dad's appearance on "Oprah" to participate in?

"I don't know," she says. "I really don't know."

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