America's Most Colorful Congresswoman: Kyrsten Sinema
Representing Arizona and also a new generation of politicians, Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema knows what it's like to live in an abandoned gas station, treats her bisexuality like it ain't no thing, and isn't afraid to wear fuchsia.
BY May 22, 2013
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In the predawn dark on the day she was to be sworn in to Congress, Kyrsten
Sinema laced up her running shoes. It was an icy 30 degrees, but there was no
question that the Arizona native was going to run. Sinema runs every day. And
her running group from back home—the five women who are her best friends, her
sounding board, and her informal political consultants—was there. As the sun
came up, the women stopped for a breather on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
and looked out over the National Mall. Some of them took cell-phone photos.
Others teared up. Sinema, always the chatty one, kept repeating, “I can’t
believe this, I can’t believe this.”
There’s much about Sinema’s story that seems unbelievable. Only 36 years old, she’s a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who also has a master’s degree, a PhD, and a law degree. She’s never been married, is openly bisexual, and claims no religion—definitely an idiosyncratic bio for a national politician. At a time when the gap between rich and poor in America has never been wider, Sinema, who was homeless for a time as a child, crosses economic divides as well as political ones. Although a staunch Democrat, she was a productive member of the conservative Arizona state legislature, where she served for seven years, and has written a book, Unite and Conquer, about how to build broad coalitions to promote progressive policies; she was elected to Congress in a newly created district that has more Republican voters than Democrat. (Not that her opponent in that race didn’t try to pigeonhole her: Republican Vernon Parker ran ads of Sinema in a Photoshopped Janis Joplin outfit under the heading radical left-wing activist.)
Sinema wasn’t the only bright young thing to report to the Capitol in January. The 2012 election, dubbed another “Year of the Woman” by some political observers (when it’s the “Year of the Man,” we ladies will finally know we’ve made it), more than doubled the size of the female under-40 contingent, from two to five. Joining Sinema are Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard, a 32-year-old combat veteran who’s also the first Hindu rep, and Grace Meng, a 37-year-old Asian-American lawyer from Queens, New York. This is a new generation that’s just starting to come of age politically—one that has the potential to rewrite some of the long-standing rules for women in politics.
As I walk into Sinema’s office on Capitol Hill—she’s been on the job for about 10 weeks—it strikes me that she’s even more of a rare species than I thought: an exotic parrot in a town of dark-feathered wrens. She’s wearing a full-skirted dress splashed with plum-colored flowers; her eyeglass frames are magenta, the water bottle from which she sips between meetings is fuchsia. (Sinema, the proud owner of more than 100 pairs of shoes, was declared best-dressed politician by an Arizona newspaper for four years running.)
“One of the reasons I ran for office in the state legislature,” Sinema tells me between meetings with representatives of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and YMCA, “was to help people. Now I have 13 staff and 10 interns. If people call our office, they’re going to get help.” That sounds like a political banality, but Sinema was a social worker before she was a politician, and when she asks visitors, “How can I help?” you actually believe she intends to. Not to mention that given her freshman status, she’s not high enough in the party hierarchy to accomplish much more. She has been named to the Democrats’ whip team, which was a bit of a coup, but even Hillary Clinton pretty much kept her head down and her goals local during her first year or two in the Senate. It may be especially important for Sinema to focus in on her 360,000 constituents for another reason: As a freshman incumbent who won by a narrow margin in 2012, she is already showing up on lists of vulnerable seats.
With Sinema’s day sliced into 15-minute blocks, her scheduler is a constant specter at the door, popping in to remind the congresswoman (though she insists her staff dispense with the honorific dictated by DC tradition and merely call her Kyrsten) that she’s got to wrap up because four more groups are crowded outside her office. After each meeting, Sinema shakes every hand in the room, straightens her posture for a quick photo op, then welcomes the next set of earnest pleaders. By all appearances, she is that superwoman we’ve all met once or twice, the person who’s actually doing the things we say we want to get around to, like training for an Ironman triathlon or reading books about physics or the brain. She’s “like a workaholic times 10,” says David Lujan, a Democrat who served in the Arizona legislature with her for six years. Sinema wakes at 5 a.m. to run (often with a few U.S. Marines) and doesn’t get home till 10 p.m. Weekends are spent in Phoenix, training for marathons and holding Congress on your Corner events to chat with constituents.
Women in previous generations tended to get into politics because a specific issue angered them, says Jessica Grounds, chair of the board of the DC-based Women Under Forty Political Action Committee (WUFPAC), one of Sinema’s early supporters. Younger women, meanwhile, seem to be running because they believe that they’re “the best person to make legislation and be a leader,” Grounds says. She pegs the shift to a larger pool of female role models and the post–Title IX environment, in which competitive behavior is more accepted in women. “The younger female candidates we work with are definitely much more ambitious,” she says.
Sinema doesn’t like the A-word. “When a man is ambitious, they use hard-working, smart. That’s unfortunate, because the word means you’re working hard and want to accomplish stuff.” (Not exactly: Men are called ambitious all the time—it’s just that the word is usually meant as a compliment.) But if Sinema isn’t ambitious, no one is. She was born in Tucson, Arizona, to middle-class Mormon parents. Her dad was an attorney, and her mother stayed at home with Kyrsten and her older brother and younger sister. When she was eight, her parents divorced and her mother married a teacher. After the family moved to a small town in the Florida Panhandle, her stepfather lost his job, and their finances collapsed. They took up residence in an abandoned gas station. This became the defining experience of her life, she says, her motivation for becoming a social worker and, later, a politician.
“I was old enough to know something was wrong,” Sinema says. “We didn’t have electricity. My stepdad built a bunk bed for me and my sister. We separated our bunk bed from the kitchen with one of those big chalkboards on rollers. I knew that was weird. A chalkboard shouldn’t be a wall. A kitchen should have running water. We didn’t have a toilet.” She wore hand-me-downs from a girl at church. They ate “welfare food” (“what you get when you don’t have money to buy regular food”) such as powdered eggs. After two years, her stepdad found a job and the family moved into a real house, but they were never middle-class again. Despite these obstacles, Sinema graduated from high school at 16 and, with the help of scholarships and a Pell grant, enrolled at Brigham Young University, earning a bachelor’s degree in social work in just two years. Around this time, she broke with Mormonism. She has since publicly criticized faith groups’ intervention in politics—“I don’t think Arizonans are interested in having the Mormon religion dictate public policy to them,” she said in 2008, when Arizona was battling over the legal definition of marriage—but she seems to take pains not to utter a bad word about her own upbringing. “My parents are very conservative,” she says, adding quickly, “they taught me the value of hard work—don’t depend on other people, do it yourself.”
Neither her mother nor father attended her congressional swearing in, and while one of her running friends, Dana Kennedy, told me that Sinema’s attitude to their absence was her usual, “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” she grew visibly uncomfortable when an interviewer from Current TV asked her a year ago whether her parents embraced their openly bisexual daughter. “I’m the first person in my family to ever hold elected office,” she said. “I think the entire Sinema clan is happy.” I think. When I ask if she spends Christmas with her family, she replies, “On most holidays you’ll find me in Mexico. Actually, on most holidays you won’t find me. I’m at a beach, and it’s wonderful.”
There’s much about Sinema’s story that seems unbelievable. Only 36 years old, she’s a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who also has a master’s degree, a PhD, and a law degree. She’s never been married, is openly bisexual, and claims no religion—definitely an idiosyncratic bio for a national politician. At a time when the gap between rich and poor in America has never been wider, Sinema, who was homeless for a time as a child, crosses economic divides as well as political ones. Although a staunch Democrat, she was a productive member of the conservative Arizona state legislature, where she served for seven years, and has written a book, Unite and Conquer, about how to build broad coalitions to promote progressive policies; she was elected to Congress in a newly created district that has more Republican voters than Democrat. (Not that her opponent in that race didn’t try to pigeonhole her: Republican Vernon Parker ran ads of Sinema in a Photoshopped Janis Joplin outfit under the heading radical left-wing activist.)
Sinema wasn’t the only bright young thing to report to the Capitol in January. The 2012 election, dubbed another “Year of the Woman” by some political observers (when it’s the “Year of the Man,” we ladies will finally know we’ve made it), more than doubled the size of the female under-40 contingent, from two to five. Joining Sinema are Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard, a 32-year-old combat veteran who’s also the first Hindu rep, and Grace Meng, a 37-year-old Asian-American lawyer from Queens, New York. This is a new generation that’s just starting to come of age politically—one that has the potential to rewrite some of the long-standing rules for women in politics.
As I walk into Sinema’s office on Capitol Hill—she’s been on the job for about 10 weeks—it strikes me that she’s even more of a rare species than I thought: an exotic parrot in a town of dark-feathered wrens. She’s wearing a full-skirted dress splashed with plum-colored flowers; her eyeglass frames are magenta, the water bottle from which she sips between meetings is fuchsia. (Sinema, the proud owner of more than 100 pairs of shoes, was declared best-dressed politician by an Arizona newspaper for four years running.)
“One of the reasons I ran for office in the state legislature,” Sinema tells me between meetings with representatives of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and YMCA, “was to help people. Now I have 13 staff and 10 interns. If people call our office, they’re going to get help.” That sounds like a political banality, but Sinema was a social worker before she was a politician, and when she asks visitors, “How can I help?” you actually believe she intends to. Not to mention that given her freshman status, she’s not high enough in the party hierarchy to accomplish much more. She has been named to the Democrats’ whip team, which was a bit of a coup, but even Hillary Clinton pretty much kept her head down and her goals local during her first year or two in the Senate. It may be especially important for Sinema to focus in on her 360,000 constituents for another reason: As a freshman incumbent who won by a narrow margin in 2012, she is already showing up on lists of vulnerable seats.
With Sinema’s day sliced into 15-minute blocks, her scheduler is a constant specter at the door, popping in to remind the congresswoman (though she insists her staff dispense with the honorific dictated by DC tradition and merely call her Kyrsten) that she’s got to wrap up because four more groups are crowded outside her office. After each meeting, Sinema shakes every hand in the room, straightens her posture for a quick photo op, then welcomes the next set of earnest pleaders. By all appearances, she is that superwoman we’ve all met once or twice, the person who’s actually doing the things we say we want to get around to, like training for an Ironman triathlon or reading books about physics or the brain. She’s “like a workaholic times 10,” says David Lujan, a Democrat who served in the Arizona legislature with her for six years. Sinema wakes at 5 a.m. to run (often with a few U.S. Marines) and doesn’t get home till 10 p.m. Weekends are spent in Phoenix, training for marathons and holding Congress on your Corner events to chat with constituents.
Women in previous generations tended to get into politics because a specific issue angered them, says Jessica Grounds, chair of the board of the DC-based Women Under Forty Political Action Committee (WUFPAC), one of Sinema’s early supporters. Younger women, meanwhile, seem to be running because they believe that they’re “the best person to make legislation and be a leader,” Grounds says. She pegs the shift to a larger pool of female role models and the post–Title IX environment, in which competitive behavior is more accepted in women. “The younger female candidates we work with are definitely much more ambitious,” she says.
Sinema doesn’t like the A-word. “When a man is ambitious, they use hard-working, smart. That’s unfortunate, because the word means you’re working hard and want to accomplish stuff.” (Not exactly: Men are called ambitious all the time—it’s just that the word is usually meant as a compliment.) But if Sinema isn’t ambitious, no one is. She was born in Tucson, Arizona, to middle-class Mormon parents. Her dad was an attorney, and her mother stayed at home with Kyrsten and her older brother and younger sister. When she was eight, her parents divorced and her mother married a teacher. After the family moved to a small town in the Florida Panhandle, her stepfather lost his job, and their finances collapsed. They took up residence in an abandoned gas station. This became the defining experience of her life, she says, her motivation for becoming a social worker and, later, a politician.
“I was old enough to know something was wrong,” Sinema says. “We didn’t have electricity. My stepdad built a bunk bed for me and my sister. We separated our bunk bed from the kitchen with one of those big chalkboards on rollers. I knew that was weird. A chalkboard shouldn’t be a wall. A kitchen should have running water. We didn’t have a toilet.” She wore hand-me-downs from a girl at church. They ate “welfare food” (“what you get when you don’t have money to buy regular food”) such as powdered eggs. After two years, her stepdad found a job and the family moved into a real house, but they were never middle-class again. Despite these obstacles, Sinema graduated from high school at 16 and, with the help of scholarships and a Pell grant, enrolled at Brigham Young University, earning a bachelor’s degree in social work in just two years. Around this time, she broke with Mormonism. She has since publicly criticized faith groups’ intervention in politics—“I don’t think Arizonans are interested in having the Mormon religion dictate public policy to them,” she said in 2008, when Arizona was battling over the legal definition of marriage—but she seems to take pains not to utter a bad word about her own upbringing. “My parents are very conservative,” she says, adding quickly, “they taught me the value of hard work—don’t depend on other people, do it yourself.”
Neither her mother nor father attended her congressional swearing in, and while one of her running friends, Dana Kennedy, told me that Sinema’s attitude to their absence was her usual, “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” she grew visibly uncomfortable when an interviewer from Current TV asked her a year ago whether her parents embraced their openly bisexual daughter. “I’m the first person in my family to ever hold elected office,” she said. “I think the entire Sinema clan is happy.” I think. When I ask if she spends Christmas with her family, she replies, “On most holidays you’ll find me in Mexico. Actually, on most holidays you won’t find me. I’m at a beach, and it’s wonderful.”
Read more: Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema - Arizona Politician Kyrsten Sinema Profile - ELLE
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