Elise Stefanik grows old

Elise Stefanik, the GOP rep from my district, New York’s 21st, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, anointed as the future of the party before she even won the seat. Fawning conservative media laud her as a winner who can woo women and Millennials with youthful ideas, and ideals.

As an undergraduate at Harvard a little over a decade ago (like I said, she’s young), she shamed Harvard undergrads in a column about the dearth of women in leadership positions at campus organizations. 

She also threw shade, as the kidz say, on Harvard students who disrupted CIA and Homeland Security speakers during a campus forum on counter-terrorism. "Yesterday was the first time that I was both embarrassed and ashamed to be associated with my fellow Harvard students," she wrote. 

More recently, she’s been the proud co-sponsor of a bill to protect sex-crime survivors.

And yet, Elise Stefanik clings like a zebra mussel to Donald Trump.

Stefanik has refused to drop her support for the GOP presidential candidate despite a dozen allegations that Trump sexually battered, assaulted or harassed women. While Stefanik criticized Trump’s now-infamous bus conversation with Billy Bush, she stands by the GOP’s man—even as many of her colleagues, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, are fleeing him.

Indeed, Republicans last week released a poll showing Stefanik crushing her Democratic and Green Party challengers. Would dumping Trump jeopardize that lead? The congresswoman evidently thinks so. She’s not taking any chances.

Stefanik certainly showed some idealism in her Harvard days. And these days, she says she takes her responsibility as a role model for young women and girls seriously. But her real lesson for all the kids out there is that when you’re a 30-something grownup, you learn to accept certain things, unpleasant things, maybe even criminal things, if you want to get ahead.

No use letting ideals trump a paycheck.