Or maybe not.

Family friends and supporters says Chelsea Clinton, who has evolved from a frizzy-haired little girl in the White House to a self-assured public figure in her own right, is ready to play an increasingly larger role in the national debate and may emerge as a pre-2016 surrogate of sorts as her mom mulls her future plans.

This does not mean a Chelsea Clinton candidacy, which she so far does not seem interested in. But it could mean serving as the Clinton public face, and a younger one, on issues that are important to both her and her mother, as Hillary Clinton takes a break from permanent public life after the State Department.

“I think she could be a powerhouse,” said former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a staunch Hillary Clinton backer in her 2008 primary campaign, of Chelsea and her ability to speak on her mom’s behalf.

“She has just, in my judgment, grown up into a person of considerable skill and competence,” he said, adding that he saw Chelsea interview her mom at a Clinton Global Initiative event last year. “I don’t know if she has a personal goal in elected politics or not, or exactly what her life goals may be, but she certainly has a lot of rich personal experience as a result of [her upbringing].”

The public fascination with Chelsea Clinton remains intact, two decades after she literally grew up in the White House before voters’ eyes, fiercely protected by two parents who, even detractors admit, succeeded admirably in protecting their teenage daughter from the trauma of a political upbringing. She took her first steps on a political issue in New York in 2011, phone-banking and volunteering to help pass New York’s gay marriage law, a result that was far from guaranteed. She reportedly helped convince her father to change his views on the issue — one that her mother has not yet weighed in on.

“Chelsea Clinton speaks for her generation of young Americans who support marriage equality by wide margins, no matter what race or gender or even party,” said Brian Ellner, an activist who organized the New York marriage campaign and worked with Clinton on it. “She has enormous credibility on the issue dating back to her work on the New York campaign.”

Yet over time, Clinton’s public presence has become more routine, in New York and elsewhere. At age 32, Chelsea is in a very different place than she was even four years ago, when she got a taste of political surrogacy on her mom’s presidential campaign (she was a teenager when her mother first ran for the Senate in New York in 2000).

Where she finds herself now is as the heir to the Clinton legacy — not of politics, but of service. Still, it’s a role that is intertwined with whatever comes next for her family, and with their public work — several sources say her mom is debating whether to make the Clinton Foundation a short-term camp for herself, or to get more deeply involved in an entity that’s been singularly identified with her husband.