The
Downfall of Kellyanne Conway
By ERIN GLORIA
RYANFEB. 17, 2017
As Kellyanne Conway
sleepwalks her way through a series of increasingly embarrassing
interviews, it’s been hard not to feel sorry for her. It was
difficult not to feel bad for her when “Saturday Night Live”
depicted her as a craven hack driven to “Fatal Attraction”-style
debasement by a desire to appear on the news. When the cast of
“Morning Joe” pointed out that Ms. Conway’s recent appearances
on news shows proved her a useless source of information, when they
sneered at Ms. Conway’s apparent White House ostracization, it was
difficult to not feel stirrings of sympathy.
But I can’t feel
sorry for Kellyanne Conway. Not anymore.
Not long ago, Ms.
Conway felt like a vital part of a system that needed smart people on
both sides to make it work. As a pollster who studied the electoral
behavior of women, she served as a bridge between the right wing and
a demographic that often seemed to perplex them.
The first time I saw
Ms. Conway speak was at a New Yorker Festival panel in 2012. I was
new to New York City. I was new to writing about politics. I was new
to writing, period. On a panel about women voters, Ms. Conway spoke
with a pragmatism that stood in opposition to contemporary TV
personalities like Elisabeth Hasselbeck, whose brand of delicate
pouting defined the conservative zeitgeist. Ms. Conway didn’t
appeal to her audience’s sympathy. She had facts.
I liked watching her
speak then. I watched her the way a person might stand at the kitchen
window and watch a raccoon abscond with the first tomato of spring. I
didn’t agree with what she was doing, but I admired her chutzpah.
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Once she took the
reins of Donald Trump’s campaign, though, she went from smooth to
slippery. She’d hammer Hillary Clinton for talking too much about
gender and duck behind her femininity in the face of legitimate
criticism. If she succeeded, it was because she was Kellyanne. If she
failed, it was because she was a woman.
In the months
leading up to the election, Ms. Conway generously lent her womanhood
as a smokescreen to the Trump campaign. She tried to insert a
watered-down version of feminism into the candidate’s platform,
despite the fact that no mainstream feminist-leaning organizations
supported him. When her boss was caught on tape bragging about
sexually assaulting women, Kellyanne Conway “as a woman”-ed her
way out of it. Confronted about Mr. Trump’s chauvinism, she snapped
back that women who were in poverty were not served during the Obama
years, as though that somehow undid her boss’s history. I gasped so
frequently when she spoke that after each interview was over, I’d
feel faint, like I’d spent the last several hours blowing up
balloons.
When Ms. Conway
breached federal ethics laws by hawking Ivanka Trump’s “stuff”
in the press briefing room, she got off with no immediate penalty
besides being “counseled on the subject.” She told Fox News that
the president supported her, that she was lucky to have a nice boss
like Donald Trump and that every woman in America should hope to have
a boss like him. She made it sound as though declining to punish a
woman for ethics violations was somehow feminist, and as though all
that matters to women is how their bosses treat them personally, not
how their bosses impact the lives of other women.
If I wasn’t too
exhausted to feel insulted, I’d have felt insulted.
As Kellyanne’s
once-forceful cable news denials have disintegrated into whimpers, I
can’t say I feel anything for her at all. I don’t mind when
people point out how tired she looks. I simply cannot dredge up any
sympathy for a person who has acknowledged the structural problems
most women face only when she is personally facing them, or used them
as derailing tactics when she’s losing an argument. I can’t mourn
the downfall of a fair-weather feminist, a woman who has used her
power to hurt other women.
Ms. Conway made her
bed. And now it’s time for her to get some sleep.
Erin Gloria Ryan
(@morninggloria) is a senior editor at The Daily Beast and the host
of Café.com’s Girl Friday podcast.
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