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Citation: The New Republic Oct 13 1997, v217, n15, p16(2)
Author: Rosin, Hanna
Title: Radical chicks. (conservative Washington women)(The
New Conservative Sisterhood)(Column) by Hanna Rosin
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COPYRIGHT 1997 The New Republic Inc.
This fall, conservative Washington women are moving down market. Bored by
their power jobs, feeling pinched by their sensible pumps, they're emulating a
new icon: the frazzled, J.C. Penney-clad, angry white female. Call it
Chenoweth chic, in honor of the gun-toting Idaho Republican congresswoman,
Helen Chenoweth. As some ladies on the right have discovered, the great thing
about Chenoweth chic is that it offers you a way to experience all the
low-cost thrills of working-class life without actually having to move into a
mobile home.
But, of course, that makes the right-wing version of cross-class sisterhood
every bit as suspect as the left-wing incarnation conservative women spend so
much time mocking. Consider recent events at the Independent Women's Forum, a
gathering place for the female wing of the conservative chatterati. This
summer IWF discovered it was all talked out. "Why do we have to be so
ponderous and heavy all the time?" sighs Barbara Ledeen, the usually bubbly
executive director. "Sometimes it feels like we're just yap, yap, yapping at
people." Ledeen floated a few ideas to cure the ennui--a Tupperware party, a
"Victoria's Secret" party--but nothing really clicked until she suggested
taking up arms. Ledeen had read a pro-gun op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by
Laura Ingraham, the princess regent of right-wing female punditry. "By
disdaining gun ownership," Ingraham had written, "feminists simply add one
more brick to their elitist Northeastern, Democratic facade." Ingraham had
suggested a feminist group hold an event called "the Annie Get Your Gun
Permit," and Ledeen did just that--reserving a morning at a shooting range in
suburban Maryland.
The day arrived and it was lovely, eighty degrees, and clear. Lunch was
packed, the course was clear, ammo and earplugs lay waiting. There was just
one problem. Almost none of the women (myself included) knew the first thing
about shooting. Ledeen had tried target practice once, to protect herself
while her husband was away, but she never got the chance to pull the trigger.
(No intruders lurked around her Chevy Chase home during her husband's
month-long absence, "Thank god.") Ann Coulter, the leggy blond msnbc
commentator, was almost appropriately attired in skin-tight jodhpurs, but then
the ammunition belt kept slipping off her invisible hips, becoming entangled
in the strap of her Chanel purse.
Out on the firing range, bird after orange neon bird whizzed into the air,
soared along its parabolic trajectory, and landed, unscathed, in an
ever-growing heap of missed targets. Thanks to expert instruction, some women
eventually got the hang of it. (I never did.) Grace Terzian, the publisher of
IWF's newsletter, scored a few hits, and Becky Norton Dunlop, the Virginia
secretary of natural resources, even hit more clay pigeons than her Marine
sharpshooter husband. But some in the group simply threw down their weapons
and fled. Christina Hoff Sommers, of the American Enterprise Institute,
stormed off with her ears covered, complaining about the noise.
Mary Martino had no such complaints, but then Martino is not a member of any
conservative women's organization: she just showed up at the skeet shoot after
spotting an item about it in The Washington Times. A teacher in a middle-class
suburb of Maryland, she has never heard of msnbc, and could never squeeze into
a pair of size zero jodhpurs. She came because she "loves shooting," and does
it every chance she gets, twice a month at least. Martino has been shooting
for ten years; when she was young, she practiced firing B.B.'s at those
miniature tubs of non-dairy creamer they give out with coffee at the 7-Eleven.
Now she goes to turkey shoots (best score wins a free frozen turkey) or
bowling pin shoots. She was reluctant to shoot at the IWF event, because
ammunition was so expensive--$10 a box, as opposed to $6.50 at Wal-Mart.
Suffice it to say that Mary Martino and Ann Coulter do not get invited to the
same parties.
IWF's skeet shoot was harmless fun--a cheerfully contrived testament to the
ironies of the new feminized populism. But sometimes this phenomenon takes a
more noxious form. By now you must have seen or heard of Susan Carpenter
McMillan, Paula Jones' new "friend and adviser," and now a regular fixture on
afternoon TV. In her own way, Carpenter McMillan is also a case study in
Chenoweth chic. Decked out in a cotton candy suit and gold medallions, the
glamorous "Susie," as she's known in Southern California, has attached herself
to Jones, the all-purpose emblem of the hassled working-class woman. There
Susie was, at her July press conference with Jones, introducing herself and
smiling benignly at her new ward. (Paula is very good with her own kids,
Carpenter McMillan explained, and she loves to take Paula shopping.)
For decades, Carpenter McMillan has been the bully in Gucci defending the less
fortunate. During her days as a militant pro-life activist in California, she
was pained by the way her pro-choice enemies treated their poor poster child,
Norma McCorvey, the Texas woman who, as the pseudonymous "Jane Roe," filed the
lawsuit that eventually became Roe v. Wade. "The lesbian-run women's
movement," Carpenter McMillan wrote in a 1995 column in The Times Union, was
disappointed that McCorvey was not a "Vassar type." "They propped her up
before the cameras and presented her as a poor woman who needed but was denied
an abortion; code words for 'white trash should not reproduce.'"
Still, it did not escape her down-at-the-heels friends that Carpenter McMillan
lived in a multimillion-dollar, 6,600-square-foot home on an acre of prime San
Marino real estate, that she drove to pro-life rallies in a Mercedes 380SL,
and that her diamond ring holds "one carat for every year I helped put my
husband through law school," as The Los Angeles Times reported. She was
eventually drummed out of the movement when the same paper revealed she had an
abortion as an unmarried college student at the University of Southern
California.
In her new incarnation, Carpenter McMillan proves she still operates according
to a rich person's notion of the not-so-rich. She often complains that lawyers
and pundits can't speak the people's English, so they carry on in
Washington-speak and legalese. How do real people speak? Someone on "Meet the
Press" should be allowed to say "wee-wee," she has said. Because Joe Six Pack
would say "wee-wee."
Carpenter McMillan also has an equally skewed conception of Jones's case. In a
few months, Carpenter McMillan has destroyed all the legitimacy that Jones's
original lawyers, Joseph Cammarata and Gilbert Davis, had painstakingly earned
for their client over the last two years. Cammarata and Davis left when she
came on, and now her husband, a personal injury lawyer, has taken over the
case. It was on the couple's advice that Jones rejected the president's latest
offer to settle for $700,000 plus a statement from the president that Paula
Jones did nothing wrong--the best she is likely to get. And now the two
original lawyers claim they are owed $800,000 in legal fees and have placed a
lien for that amount on any settlement.
Carpenter McMillan drags Jones right back to the fever swamps of the far
right. She's called the president a "slimeball," a "liar," and a "philanderer"
on television. "I do not respect a man who ... exposes his wee-wee to a
stranger," she said on "Crossfire" in July. Her particular talk-show tic is
the incessant repetition of the host's name through her clenched teeth. In a
ten-minute span on that same edition of "Crossfire," she exclaimed: "Well,
Bill Press, I know who you'll believe because I know who you'll want to
believe ... Are you crazy, Bill?... They were not in the hotel room, Bill
Press ... Bill, you know, get control of yourself, don't laugh all over
yourself."
As it happens, Carpenter McMillan knows Bill Press, and he knows all about
her. "She has a sick passion for publicity," he says, recalling her days in
California. When Press had a weekend radio program, Carpenter McMillan would
call almost every show, often from her car phone, sometimes just to say she
agreed with him on some minor point. "It was just weird," he says. "She's
always desperately wanted national attention." West Coast feminist Gloria
Allred has similar memories. When Allred was a television commentator in the
'80s, Carpenter McMillan called the station to demand they hire her as well.
"This must be Nirvana for Susan," says Allred. "She couldn't have dreamed up
something better than this." Still, it could be worse. Just imagine if she
were armed.
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