Elise Stefanik’s `impenetrable armor’

By Ken Tingley

“The impenetrable armor of Elise Stefanik” was published Dec. 22 in The Washington Post.

It’s a great headline. It got my attention.

It is not a hit piece or a critique of Stefanik’s policies or an indictment of her support for Donald Trump. It is a labored attempt to understand why Elise Stefanik changed as a person, and an attempt to understand why she sees enemies everywhere, even among former friends and classmates.

The writer, Ruby Cramer, was named named national political enterprise reporter for the Post earlier this year. Essentially, her job is to do in-depth features on those in politics. To be working at the Post at her age is impressive. I suspect Cramer was attracted to the material because she is also a young woman in a male-dominated profession trying to make a name for herself. Like Stefanik, she also went to an elite college, not Harvard, but Vassar.

Cramer tried to figure out what many others have failed to do - find out what makes her tick. She looked closely at Stefanik’s Instagram posts, trying to understand her on a personal level. She describes Stefanik’s personal references to her mom’s Christmas Day omelets, her Dad’s Christmas Eve pierogies and date nights with her husband. It was all there for anyone to see. And at some point, Stefanik wanted the public to see it, too.

“The Elise Stefanik on Instagram gave snippets of earnest advice and liked to tag her friends, punctuating inside jokes with laughing-crying and eye emojis,” wrote Cramer. “There were jokes about the family dog Nala. Her love of Broadway show tunes. Her favorite restaurants. The first jobs she worked as a clerk at an Old Navy store, as a counselor at an astronomy camp, as a coast check girl at a museum.”

The point was it showed Stefanik was like most of us on a journey to find their mission in life and part of that was having fun on social media with friends and family.

Cramer managed to get a 40-minute interview with Stefanik in November. That’s not very long for an in-depth feature, but its more time than most local reporters get. Cramer notes she mentioned the Instagram posts during the interview. She pointed out that Stefanik did not seem to do them anymore and Cramer wondered why.

Stefanik said it was because of security and privacy concerns.

She hinted at threats and concerns for the safety of her family.

But here is perhaps the saddest part.

Cramer wrote that after she talked to Stefanik about those old Instagram posts that made her look so human, so much like so many of us, they were all gone. Stefanik had deleted them.

“It is true that Elise Stefanik has changed,” Cramer wrote.

But of course, those of us in the 21st Congressional District have known that for some time. Cramer summed it up this way:

She set aside the posture of a moderate politician and pursued new ambitions inside Trump world. She set aside some of her optimism about the potential of politics and replaced it with the language of hardened partisan warrior. In the halls of Congress, where she was once celebrated in magazines as the face of a more transparent, collaborative government, she now operates from a place of distrust, poised for a fight with the reporters she believes have or will attack her “in vicious, vicious ways.” the more effective she felt she was, the more she felt attacked. And the more attacked she felt, the further the change took hold. “The smears and the meltdown of the media,” she said, “sort of began this chapter.”

But as someone who was there in the beginning, none of that rings true about the local reporters and editors who covered her. The coverage was fair and maybe even too soft considering her lack of North Country roots.

She always kept the local reporters at a distance and seemed reluctant to meet with editorial boards where editors would respectfully ask difficult questions, but when she didn’t answer the question, they followed up by telling her so. We were also trying to find out what made her tick.

When people ask me about the Elise Stefanik I met then, I tell them I never knew what she stood for.

Over time, the number of town halls diminished and then evaporated. The constituency outreach she bragged about were with friendly supporters and small groups of local people service groups who did not follow politics closely and thrilled to meet a sitting congresswoman.

And then she embraced Donald Trump in a district where many others were doing the same.

Cramer writes about her losing friendships, being ostracized form Harvard’s school of government and making her inner-circle smaller and smaller. Cramer wrote Stefanik used the word “vicious” eight times to describe Democrats and the media.

“In place of the openness she often once presented, Stefanik has developed a thick armor, smooth and hard, with no grooves or edges there to hold,” Cramer wrote.

It’s a nice piece of visual writing that shows there is little connection between Stefanik,  constituents and those who knew her in the past. She has chosen to eliminate them from the narrative as her ambitions grow. She does not need those relationships, just defenses. You are either for her or against her.

I would argue that Stefanik’s was always cautious and the openings there for us to understand her were tiny and hard to see. They are almost non-existent today.

Like any good in-depth profile, Cramer chronicles her early years at Albany Academy where people mostly had good things to say about her. The advisor for her mock trial team said, “She was a born actor” in the courtroom. We see that in Congress now.

Cramer writes about a smart, determined woman wanting to change the world. That first impression is what voters in our congressional district saw, too.

After reading about those early years, I watched a second-season episode of idealist political drama “The West Wing” that was more than two decades old. In this episode, a young idealist Republican lawyer named Ainsley Hayes is hired by the liberals in the West Wing and fights to do the right thing because she is a patriot. She wants what’s best for America.

It is a quaint notion of a bygone era, but for a moment I wondered if Elise Stefanik could have been Ainsley Hayes. And what happened to prevent it.

Cramer concludes it was the impeachment hearings in 2019 that “radicalized” Stefanik and made her a star. Remember, she was a “born actor.”

“Stefanik already believed that young conservative women had it tough,” Cramer wrote. “But as her support for Trump grew and as more scrutiny followed - as the calls to classmates and friends began, as the stories about her political transformation arrived - her view of sexism hardened in step, knitting the two together into a tight knot of resentment.”

Stefanik tells Cramer she resented that newspapers printed age repeatedly during that first campaign. The reality was that her campaign continually promoted her as the fresh new face of politics and if elected, the youngest congresswoman ever. She and her team crafted that narrative.

“When you go through the rigmarole with the press, wrestling every day in upstate New York, you have a skewed vision of the press,” Stefanik’s press secretary Charissa Parent told Cramer. “For a while, it was `She couldn’t have a seat at the table because she was the youngest woman.’ Then she couldn’t have a seat at the table in leadership because the local press was saying, `How could she do it when she had a baby?’”

There are four small daily community newspapers in her district with news responsibilities far more important than what the young congresswoman was doing at any one moment. They all had bigger fish to fry and she gradually took to social media rather than the traditional media. There were no wrestling matches. Most reporters could not get her on the phone.

The Washington Post story is a sad indictment of a young, talented woman believing she is surrounded by enemies with no one to trust.

“The team around Stefanik believes that the people who say she’s changed come from a place of malice,” Cramer wrote. “That the media is `shameless’ and `vicious.’ That friends who have problems with her are `just not a friend.’”

“These beliefs have hardened Stefanik, but they have also become a source of defiance and energy in her world,” Cramer wrote.

It explains her incessant attacks on Twitter.

Apparently, she believed she is just retaliating for perceived slights.

Hopefully, she doesn’t really believe that every person on the other side of the aisle is evil. But that is how it appears.

It is a sad way to live your life.

And it is hard to believe she will ever be very happy doing it.

New book outlet

Happy to welcome the latest outlet to carry my books. The Warren County Historical Society sold out of my first book “The Last American Editor” so I have restocked it with the first book and now my second book “The Last American Newspaper.”

If you have not been to the museum, you should check it out at its Gurney Lane location this holiday week.