Young Glory

Kennedy makes being a conservative Republican look almost, well, cool. By day the 21-year-old swoons for Dan Quayle and thinks Dick Cheney rocks the planet. Come midnight, she's the alternative-music video jock on MTV stumping for bands like Urge Overkill and Nine Inch Nails. LLOYD GROVE gets the Kennedy party line

LLOYD GROVE

'This is one Kennedy I could support for public office," Dan Quayle says.

"Dan rocks!" says Kennedy, returning the compliment.

This Kennedy (full name: Lisa Kennedy Montgomery) is the screamingly quirky 21-year-old video jock, known for her hornrimmed glasses, her high-piled hair, and the tattoo of a pink Republican elephant on her upper thigh. For nearly two years she's been the star of MTV's Alternative Nation, a popular late-night show devoted largely to grunge bands. More recently she has become the heroine of the New Counterculture—that is, the young-conservative rebellion against the Democrats in authority. Kennedy's tattoo isn't a souvenir from a lost weekend at the Heritage Foundation; it was premeditated and deeply felt.

"Getting a tattoo here was immense pain," she says, pulling down her pants to flash the objet dart. "I had PMS, I was bloated, and this bald guy named Cameron with all these fuckin' nose rings and earrings and, you know, ink all over his body was rubbing my legs and saying, 'You O.K., princess? You O.K.?' 'No. I'm not O.K. Put the damn needle in my skin and let me be.'"

All to prove her loyalty to the party of Quayle. In fact, she claims to be "the biggest Dan Quayle fan this side of the Wabash River," as she wrote to his office in a recent letter, "spearheading the Quayle '96 fan club here at MTV." When he was vice president—and she was using the nom de rock "the Virgin Kennedy" as a D.J. on Southern California's KROQ— she sent him mash notes and recited poetry about him. "They were really sexual sonnets," Kennedy explains.

"I met him when I was a high-school student in Oregon," she recounts. "There was a political fund-raiser in Portland, and all of us teen Republicans got to sit in on this private little briefing on Nicaragua. Everyone was bored to tears, but I sat there kind of flailing on the edge of my seat. Every time he looked at me, I winked at him, and he quickly looked away. When he looked at me again, I winked at him again, and he looked away again. At the end, when we all went up to shake his hand, he gave me a wink. I thought that was soooo cool!"

Earlier this year, Kennedy was thumbing through National Review when she spotted Quayle in an ad for the 21st annual Conservative Political Action Conference—a sober Washington conclave celebrating lower taxes, universal access to guns, public-school prayer, and the missionary position. Nearly swooning from the excitement, Kennedy binged on Twizzlers before chilling out enough to sign up for the conference, along with 1,400 other true believers.

The event was Kennedy's ideological coming-out party. Headlining a panel on the evils of political correctness, she received thunderous applause for her send-up of the heretofore unnoticed scourge of pro-choice environmentalism: "We can't hurt the animals," she whined, "but I gotta go—I have to catch the car pool to the abortion clinic!" She made the scene in black lipstick and punky dresses, squired by a variety of "suitwearing hunks," the flower of Young Republicanhood.

"You think I'm a big poseur politically, don't you? Well, I'm not! Ma-aa-an!" Kennedy protests. "I love free markets. I love defense. I'm very patriotic. I hate taxes. ... I love the old white guys."

She may talk loudly and carry a big shtick, but market-smart adherents of the Grand Old Party have embraced Kennedy with feverish intensity, as though she were the second coming of Lee Atwater—the late guitar twanger and hardball strategist who played politics like it was rock 'n' roll. A recent column in the New York Post by thirtysomething activist L. Brent Bozell III (titled "Why Do Conservatives Love This Kennedy?") argued that she is a stinging rebuke to liberals who depict all rightwingers as "stuffy middleaged men or repressed women sporting a blue rinse, constantly decrying the collapse of our moral standards. . . . Truth be told, conservatism never looked so urban, chic and appealing."

But there's also Kennedy's unbounded admiration for such new friends as G. Gordon Liddy ("Awesome!" proclaims Kennedy), P. J. O'Rourke ("He's God!"), Oliver North ("He looks like he watches MTV"), Dick Cheney ("He rocks the planet!"), and John McLaughlin ("He rules!"), Kennedy pursued the famed former Jesuit priest and McLaughlin Group moderator through the crush at MTV's inaugural ball. "John! John!" she shouted. According to McLaughlin, who recounts the incident with more than usual stentorian verve, "she said she was a bona fide Republican and had the tattoo to prove it! Whereupon she produced a small, pink pachyderm on her upper thigh! That caused considerable gawking, admiration, and appreciation by the multitudes!"

(Continued on page 153)

'I love free markets. I love defense. I'm very patriotic.... I love the old white guys."

(Continued from page 124)

Kennedy parlayed this exposure into appearances on McLaughlin's cable show and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. And now the producers of CNN & Co., a daytime all-women talkfest, are thinking of using her, MTV is considering her as the host of its own McLaughlin Group-type show, and McLaughlin doesn't dismiss the idea of giving Kennedy a seat one day on the Group itself. "I am willing to review anybody who has knowledge and insight, and some experience," he says, "and who can present a point of view with clarity and force!"

"Are we gonna get to the boring part now?" Kennedy wants to know. "It's so boring reading about politics in magazines like Vanity Fair. It just seems so awkward: 'Kennedy likes boxing and poetry and she sleeps on bunk beds AND SHE ALSO FEELS THAT THE NATIONAL DEFICIT SHOULD BE REDUCED BY 41.3 PERCENT!' It's like reading the back of the Charmin package."

It's after midnight in Manhattan, and she's holding forth at the Kiev, a Lower East Side Ukrainian restaurant to which she has repaired after a grueling day taping a week's worth of shows, introducing rock videos, interviewing a video director, and improvising voice-overs for animated MTV logos. "Talented performer?" Kennedy scoffs, arching her eyebrows to beat back a compliment. "I don't know if I'd say I was a talented performer. I just introduce videos all day."

That is, when not taping her fiveminute daily radio show, heard on 300odd college stations, or lounging on her bunk bed in the roomy East Village apartment she shares with MTV talent coordinator Sheri Howell, or reading Richard Nixon ("Six Crises is a great book!"), or climbing into the ring to spar at Manhattan's Times Square Boxing, or pumping iron at the gym, or penning steamy sonnets—such as one described in an MTV press release as "her haunting master work, 'Love is a Hardened Mustard Stain on My Shirt.' "

"I'm obnoxious," Kennedy concedes. "A lot of the mail I get is like the letter that came accusing me of being a fat liberal feminist. I'm like 'Whoa!' That really wouldn't make too much sense. I get 25 letters a day maybe. I get a lot of mail from prisons."

Kennedy says she grew up rousing rabble with her two older brothers in suburban Portland, and was preternatural ly precocious—she was talking in complete sentences by her second birthday and had already passed through a druggie phase by age 14. As a high-school senior she liked to trek downtown to pursue what her best friend, Kiki Froelich, a star cheerleader, calls "pimping." Pimping? "You know, we pretended to be prostitutes," Kiki says. Oh.

Kennedy insists her pal is only joking. "We hung out downtown and we tried to date bikers and musicians," she says. "Kiki and I always had something going. We were always getting in trouble for putting on shows for the freshman boys. We'd sing songs and semi-strip, and put out a cup and they'd throw their change in it. We'd get called to the principal's office: 'You can't do that to 14-year-old boys! They're going into class and they're being rambunctious and wound up and they're not paying attention. You're disrupting their educations.' We were like 'Swe-ee-et! YesP "

Now, on to the boring part. "In what sense do you consider yourself a conservative?"

"In the sixth sense. It's in my blood. I can't help it. It's like Frankenstein."

"Like your obsession with Dan Quayle?"

"No. That's a by-product of my conservatism. And of a severe obsessive disorder. If I were—oh God, it hurts to even think it—if I were a li . . . li . . . li . . . liberal, maybe I would have an obsession with A1 Gore. But I don't think so. No, I don't see that as possible."

As for Bill Clinton, "I don't trust him," she says. And the First Lady? "Hillary has got to make up her mind about her hair. She's got to sit down with Giuseppe Franco for an hour and go through a couple copies of Elle and pick something right for her."

So she liked the White House style before the Clintons messed everything up?

"Are you kidding? Reagan was a genius! He was a superstar! Bedtime for Bonzo!"

Even so, the Grand Old Party is worlds apart from the sort of bash Kennedy is accustomed to. Like the one she threw recently in honor of Rocket from the Crypt, her favorite grunge band (whose rocket-shaped logo she has tattooed on her left ankle, allowing her into all their concerts for free). On that festive occasion, "Speedo," Rocket's lead singer, helped throw a member of an Australian band, Lubricated Goat, down a flight of stairs after the miscreant put out his cigarette on a family portrait. And Rocket's 18-year-old trumpet player, "JC 2000," passed out and threw up on Kennedy's roommate's bed.

The former vice president did not attend.