She may be nesting, but Mary Matalin is more of a hawk than ever

BY MARGARET TALBOT

It's 6:30 in the evening and Mary Matalin, Republican operative and media phenom, has her cowboy boots propped against her desk and her 2-year-old daughter, Matty, propped against her cowboy boots. Matty, whose resemblance to James Carville leaves her paternity in no doubt, wants her denim jacket, now. "No whining," says Matalin evenly, and coming from her it sounds like a credo.

Matalin was almost certainly the first Republican woman anyone ever called hip, and one of the ways she won that label was by bad-mouthing Democrats in the rhetoric of the tough broad. Snivelers, she called her opponents when she was political director of George Bush's 1992 campaign. Whiners. It was she who made the world safe for a new crop of self-described "Republican chicks" -- the caustic TV commentator and conservative "It" girl Laura Ingraham, the gum-snapping Congresswoman-turned-TV anchor Susan Molinari, the swaggering anti-feminists of the Washington-based Independent Women's Forum. The Republican chicks haven't exactly closed the gender gap (women still vote for Democrats far more reliably than men do), but that's not to say they've been insignificant. They have, for instance, contributed mightily to the cultural re-evaluation of feminists as querulous fuddie-duddies who refuse to buck up and get on with it as the conservative gals have. And they have jumbled up what might be called the aesthetic signifiers of conservatism, so that it is possible now to imagine a Republican woman who is neither a society matron hosting luncheons in St. John's knits nor a born-again housewife storming an abortion clinic.

The Republican chicks aren't always in lock step on the issues. Molinari and Matalin are pro-choice, for example; Ingraham isn't. But they are united by their moony-eyed love for their own novelty, which they are forever touting, just as Matalin was forever reassuring young Republicans that they were "way cool." A press release for a recent Independent Women's Forum confab -- "No Left Turn" -- made winking reference to the good looks of its membership, burbling that "this event will definitely lend itself to photographers since the committee does not look at all like Phyllis Schlaflys or Barbara Bushes." For her part, Laura Ingraham has managed to squeeze more ink out of her penchant for leopard-wear than Mobuto Sese Seko ever got out of his. One of the chickhood, former Dan Quayle speech writer Lisa Schiffren, says a lot of the attention paid it can be attributed to what she calls the "talking dog thing." They're young! They wear miniskirts! They're conservatives!

At 43, with her own radio show modeled on her idol Rush Limbaugh's, Mary Matalin is the big sister, the head girl, the top talking dog in this sorority. (It helps, of course, that by marrying James Carville, her opposite Democratic number, she sort of cornered the talking dog market once and for all.) She is also the first to have become a mother, which makes her an interesting test case for how parenthood will or won't change the politics and image of the Republican chick.

OK, first the image: Matalin's, anyway, is still ecumenically hip. When I meet up with her in her funky office in a gentrifying corner of southeast Washington, she has just finished her three-hour daily radio show and is considering whether to join Carville at the Orioles game that night. Her outfit looks like it was put together with fun in mind: slim, faded jeans, green brocade vest, dangly locket, and those boots. Her office is an unintimidating mess, with a cherry-red jogging stroller taking pride of place and a desk piled high with hair curlers, half-empty pizza boxes and press clippings. Matty is rooting around in this tableau, gurgling to herself and intermittently crowing "Ciao, Baby!" to various members of Matalin's staff as they leave for the night.

In some ways, talking with Matalin is like talking with any other working mother -- or at least any working mother of a certain age and class. There was never any question that Matalin would resume her career after her daughter was born. "I have a roving mind, and if it's not roving in some directed way, it's going to rove somewhere else. I can't just stay in the house." Besides, she grew up with a mother who worked -- first as a beautician and then as the proprietor of her own chain of beauty schools on the south side of Chicago. "It was sort of unique for that time and place that she had a job. All the other moms in the neighborhood sort of talked behind her back. But my earliest memory is of being proud of her, and now when I look back I'm even prouder."

Sometimes when she's musing about motherhood, Matalin even sounds like the hippie she claims to have been, ineluctably rooted in her generation. "Matty has never slept in a crib," she says at one point. "It just felt so much more natural for her to sleep with us. It hasn't bothered us; we get done what we need to get done. And it's so beautiful to wake up and see her little face right there." She wants to have another child and worries that she won't be able to because she started so late, but admits that, like so many in her cohort, she was never interested in kids when she was younger. "We'd love to have more. We're trying, but we've had a lot of miscarriages before her and since... I'm not going to do in vitro and all that stuff. I'm pretty philosophically steeped in if it's meant to be it's meant to be. But you know, all my friends who've had kids are older and they all say that their biggest regret is that they didn't have another."

Yet for all this, it quickly becomes clear that Matalin's superficial resemblance to any number of yuppie liberal moms does not extend as far as her politics. If anything, she says, motherhood has pushed her further to the right. She's more skeptical of government programs than ever and firmly believes, for example, that the Family and Medical Leave Act -- the centerpiece of the Clinton administration's anodyne family policy -- should be repealed. ("It's not working and it's driving a lot of businesses crazy," she claims. "It's insulting to businesses to say they wouldn't already have policies in place that are helpful to their employees and allow them to keep the best people. I've been a steelworker. I've been a cocktail waitress. I've been a hairdresser. I've been a political operative, and I've never worked anywhere where the system was set up to abuse me or to make it difficult for me to attend to a family emergency.") She's more devoted than ever to school vouchers -- an idea she says she used to push mainly for its campaign appeal and now believes in for its merits. When I ask her if she thinks there's anything the federal government can or should do to make families' lives better, she says "make our streets safe." But then she pauses and says, no, "even that's not the federal government's job; it's the local government's." The hip Republican moms may change the look of the conservative movement but, judging by Matalin, they aren't likely to prod it much closer to the political center.

Is there any common ground, I ask Matalin, between the pro-family forces of the left and right? Maybe, she says, in one area: the growing consensus that divorce is damaging to children and should be made more difficult to obtain. Even Carville, she says, has come around on that. She's right, but truth be told, there are limits even to that convergence -- disputes within the marriage-saving ranks about, for example, whether to push for the repeal of no-fault divorce laws.

On the way home, I think about what my own proposal for finding common ground would be. I remember the argument made in a recent issue of the "Women's Quarterly," the newsletter of the Independent Women's Forum. "Unfortunately," wrote editor Danielle Crittenden, "the feminist women who implored millions of middle-class women to leave their families and homes for the work force have virtually nothing useful to say about the problems this exodus created." The main solution women's groups have put forward -- state-sponsored day care -- is the least attractive, yet "it has dominated national debate to the extent that measures which might genuinely help women to combine motherhood and work seldom get much attention."

Mainstream feminists could acknowledge the merits of this point of view -- namely that most American women don't seem to want government-sponsored institutional child care -- and in exchange the Republican chicks could declare a moratorium on dissing them for even considering government solutions to family dilemmas. Mainstreamers could think seriously about adopting the (Republican) idea of child-care vouchers that could be used to subsidize your choice of baby sitter -- grandma, nanny, neighbor or child-care center. And Republicans could acknowledge that repealing the Family and Medical Leave Act is the kind of turn-back-the-clock measure that turns off most female voters, and rightly so. (Matalin's solicitude for their feelings notwithstanding, most businesses can probably take the "insult" of government-mandated leave policies.)

It's a modest enough idea, and not especially hip, but hey, Mary, what do you think?
June 16, 1997

Margaret Talbot is a senior editor at "The New Republic."

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