Kellyanne Conway Has Been Quietly Revolutionizing D.C. Since the Late '90s

From Harper's BAZAAR

On November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway became the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign. The female face of Donald Trump's bid for the Oval Office, Conway joined his campaign in July 2016 and was promoted to manager in August. She spent the next two months defending her boss's indiscretions, and following Trump's win, was promoted to Counselor to the President. Since President Trump's inauguration, she's appeared in several controversial television segments, from coining "alternative facts" to describe the White House's official statement about the Inauguration crowd size to citing an incident-which never happened-entitled "the Bowling Green Massacre" to explain President Trump's Muslim ban

In a 1998 issue of Harper's BAZAAR, Conway (then Fitzpatrick) appeared alongside the female faces of the Republican party of the late '90s-Audrey Mullen, Kara Kindermann, Amy Holmes, April Lassiter and Ann Coulter. Dubbed "pundettes," these young, stylish women were known for the sharp conservative values and causing havoc on cable news. Sound familiar? Below, writer Elinor Burkett explores the women who aspire to "the destruction of every liberal program constructed in America over the past generation."

Washington, D.C. isn't known for its hot babes. Tailored suits with sensible pumps are the sine qua non of congressional drag. The preppy look is obligatory for Hill Rats, the 20- and 30-somethings who work for dirt and the illusion of power. Gray, tan, and navy are the only safe colors in a town where image is political capital and even a hint of attitude can cost you 40,000 votes

In this bland sea it's hard to miss the bad girls of the radical right. At the Wednesday morning meetings of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), where the Republican revolution was conceptualized, they sit tapping their high heels while advocating the decimation of affirmative action. They dominate meetings at conservative think tanks with brash intellect and equally brazen attitude. And at night they puff on cigars at soirees thrown by the editors of The Weekly Standard, the bible of self-styled neocons, and trade tales about Big Brother's intrusion into the lives of innocent Americans. Fixtures on the Washington social scene, they bring an eye-catching confrontational attitude to a conservative political agenda long associated with crossed-ankles propriety.

"People think that you can't have a radical life and a conservative ideology" says Amy Holmes, a 24 year-old policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum, a Washington-based antifeminist group. "They assume that conservative women are blue-haired ladies who want to slap chastity belts on young women," Holmes says, "and that young conservative women are precious white Southerners with careful bobs, little red fingernails, careful little jackets, careful little skirts. Well, I'm not some southern belle, and I'm certainly not white. But I'm definitely conservative. Conservatism is the liberating philosophy, the philosophy of the 90's. Liberalism is passé."

Ann Coulter, 33, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, is a self-described "bomb thrower and winger." "Don't call me a Republican," insists the long-legged blonde, whose been dubbed the right-wing Abbie Hoffman. "I'm a conservative." In Coulter's lexicon, mainstream GOP women are the "thrash-the-servants crowd," and "winger" is her proud shorthand for right-winger.

Twenty-nine-year-old April Lassiter, the Alanis Morissette of the neocons, plays in a rock band when not agitating for the Republican revolution. "I have no patience for your wink-and-nod politicization," she sings in one of her songs. "I have no interest in your femi-Nazi actualization." And political pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, 30, who was branded by The Weekly Standard as a new member of "a new class of Washington-bred cigar-and-martini bimbos," insists that her greatest feat is that her "broad mind and small waist have not switched places."

But don't be fooled by these women's mediagenic bombast. They might speak in sound bites and brag about being chicks, but they are dead serious when it comes to achieving their goal: the destruction of every liberal program constructed in America over the past generation.

"The arrival of the chic, conservative, female Power Rangers on the scene in the '90s has totally blown apart the strangehold that the feminist establishment one had on "women's issues," says a feminist and cultural critic Camille Paglia, who sees the new breed as an interesting, if troubling, phenomenon. "These formidable new women are smart, aggressive, and fast on their feet."

As the vanguard of a new counterculture that combines Pat Buchanan-esque family values with rock & roll, they are intent on dispelling popular preconceptions about what women want and who conservatives are. Unlike the leftist rebels of earlier generations, these women worship Ronald Reagan and not, say, Gloria Steinem or Hilary Rodham Clinton. Their sexual revolution promotes abstinence rather than experimentation, and the concept of sisterhood is not even on their radar; to them that's just hopelessly dated feminist rhetoric. To a woman they have no taste for moderation.

Holmes has positioned herself at the forefront of the war against feminism and seemingly stops at nothing to combat conference on the problem of sexual harassment on campuses, organized by the Safe School Coalition. Her mission: to force liberal women to hear at least one female voice declaring that sexual harassment complaints are overblown. The next week she'll infiltrate a meeting on affirmative action where she, as a black woman, will argue that it is an impediment to both her own progress and to the development of a color-blind society. Most recently she's been shaking up Georgetown University by helping female undergraduates establish a conservative women's group. Late last year they published The Guide: A Little Beige Book for Today's Miss G, in which they declared, "The fight for equality is largely a thing of the past; after all, two Supreme Court justices, the secretary of state and attorney general all wear heels." The booklet caused an uproar: Professors denounced the group in class, the school newspaper was inundated with letters accusing them of treason, and the Women's Studies faculty refused to even appear in the same room with the young neocons.

Audrey Mullen, 30, executive director of ATR, claims she has never seen a federal program she likes (apart from defense-related ones). When she's not relaxing on the shooting range-with a shotgun, not a handgun-she's flying around the country enlisting support for the Leave Us Alone Coalition, an informal alliance of anti-tax, anti-affirmative action and anti-regulation groups. On her own syndicated weekly radio program-and any other microphone offered her-she warns of the dangers of oppressive government and has been particularly vocal about the poor success rates of government-run rehab programs. "Bad government does a lot more than waste money," she says. "It kills people." Subtlety not being her style, Mullen recently landed in the news when she walked into a hotel bar and threw a drink in the face of conservative writer Tucker Carlson, who had dissed both Mullen and her boss, ATR president Grover Norquist.

Coulter, like her ideological opposite, the late William Kunstler, is obsessed with protecting civil liberties and free speech. But the speech she is trying to protect, which includes every form of controversial political incorrectness from sexist comments to racial epithets, is threatened by liberals. The civil liberties she defends tend to be those of men since, in her view, the rights of males have been trampled by years of feminist progress. Her proudest legal accomplishments include her work with the Senate Judiciary Committee, for whom she wrote a law facilitating the deportation of aliens convicted of felonies, and persuading a court to overturn core provisions of the Violence Against Women Act. "We're using the courts to make law, just the way liberals used to," Coulter says defiantly. "Conservatives complained about that for years. God, it's fun."

Heirs to a tradition of youthful rebellion, these women share a youthful impulse with their left-wing predecessors: a desire to dismantle the status quo. These days rebel turf is on the right, and to be radical is, increasingly, to be reactionary. Their political beliefs have nothing in common with the more complacent, old-style conservatism, the kind that young conservatives traditionally inherit from affluent Republican parents concerned with protecting their patrimony. With the exception of Coulter, whose father is a union-busting attorney, these women are hardly aristocrats defending their lineage. Kellyanne Fitzpatrick was raised by a single mother and worked summers packing blueberries. April Lassiter's adoptive mom, a nurse in Washington, D.C., is both a feminist and "soft" socialist who has had to learn to cope with her daughter's heresy, much the way the mother's of the '60s rebels struggled to deal with their daughter's antiwar pronouncements. And according to Holmes, her mother, who dropped out of college to marry a black African, finds conservatism "aesthetically repulsive."

Only Coulter's parents are Republicans, although they favor polite Connecticut conservatism over their daughter's down-and-dirty zealotry. "Maybe it's genetic," Coulter says with a laugh. "But my politics probably come from the fact that I went to Cornell, a real bastion of liberalism, and the fact that I like to play devil's advocate. I argued so well that I convinced myself. If I'd gone to Oral Roberts, I'd probably be a raging liberal."

Coulter's love of debate-and camera readiness-helped make her one of the poster girls of the new right. After the republicans took over Congress in 1995, Coulter and her cohorts became the darlings of the very media that had ignored or mocked the far right for years. Major newspapers breathlessly "discovered" that Washington was crawling with attractive, audacious young conservatives, George magazine ran alluring photos of them, and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal couldn't get enough of their philosophizing.

Laura Ingraham, 33, the foremother of the group, has appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine decked out in a leopard-print skirt. Having cut her political teeth as a law clerk for Clarence Thomas, Ingraham was scooped up by CBS, which precipitated a flood of competition for the smuggest, sexiest, conservative women to serve as America's new "pundettes."

"We became our own market niche," say Coulter, who was hired to be a political commentator on MSNBC. Fitzpatrick, a lawyer and founder of the conservative research firm the Polling Company (and who has dated presidential aspirant Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee), provided election coverage on CNN & Co., popularly known as "Bitches In Boxes" because of the show's Hollywood Squares-style set, and Politically Incorrect pounced on them as the ideal foils for its liberal guests. "When you think of Republicans, you think of flinty old white guys like Bob Dole," says Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect's host. "People don't think of Republican women. So when these smart, glamorous young women come along, they pretty much had an open field."

For a while, heady with all of the attention, they obediently performed on cue, churning out pithy, explosive opinions. But perhaps inevitably, they have been criticized for appearing to tailor their views for social success and status, which, says Paglia, makes them "look like glib opportunists, and they risk losing the respect of observers of all political persuasions."

The more serious conservatives have begun to draw back. Coulter, who has been fired and rehired repeatedly by MSNBC for her consistently controversial views (ironically, just the quality that made her desirable to them in the first place), is tired of the struggle to keep her place on television. "Throwing yourself into the fire for the movement is one thing," she says, "but being fed to the lions is over the edge."

The last time Lassiter appeared on Politically Incorrect, she almost got into a fistfight with diehard liberal Laura Hutton over the role of mainstream women's political organizations. The encounter in Lassister's eyes reeked of exploitation. "They love to trot me out because they think I'm a walking oxymoron," she says. "But I'm not sure I want to perform for their amusement. They're a disgusting group of boomers. They sit there bashing conservatives for being right and different, but who do they think they're kidding? They're total hypocrites." Lassiter, in fact, has become shy about giving interviews at all, aware that the media's incessant preoccupation with her appearance can ultimately diminish her credibility. "Reporters never want to ask me about substance," she says. "They just want to talk about how I dress."

Even while their detractors trivialize their political beliefs by harping on their looks, they young women have earned a measure of respect within certain circles. "To understand the role of women in the conservative movement, we must look to the leadership of women in positions of power, like Margaret Thatcher," says Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. "On the shoulders of Lady Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, these young conservative women strengthen the movement."

Lassiter, for all dismissive remarks that have been made about her miniskirts and electric guitars, is intent on making a difference. As a policy adviser to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, she helped manage the family-values coalition in the face of liberal and moderate attack. Currently she is launching her own nonprofit organization, the Initiative for Children, to promote private sector solutions to pressing domestic issues like affordable child care and health care. "After years of trying to make the government work, I realized that the problem isn't political corruption or indifference," Lassiter says. "The problem is that people looked to the government for solutions in the first place. Hillary was right. It does take a village. But the government is not a village."

Kara Kindermann, who works on Gingrich's communication and press team, is at the center of the Republican revolution. Though probably the most earnest of the young neocons, Kindermann nonetheless speaks with the sassy self-assuredness that has become that defining characteristic of her peer group. "People pass us off as flip or dangerous," she says. "But what's to be afraid of? We have a different view of how to deal with the nation's problems, from drugs to teen pregnancy, crime and welfare. Give us a chance. You'll find out we are right."

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