Mary Quite Contrary

Mary Pilcher Cook knocks on another front door. This white ranch house on the residential stretch of Johnson Drive west of I-35 is owned by Republicans. Cook is a Republican who represents them in the Kansas Statehouse. Still, she can't be sure of her reception.

It could go either way.

Two children peer through the storm door at the strange car parked in the gravel driveway. Cook works up a smile as the door opens. She extends a hand to the young blond woman who answers and then to the woman's husband, John, who joins them on the front steps.

Despite what her critics claim, Cook says, she does not hate public schools. Nor were the state's budget problems this spring as bad as the governor said. The state didn't need to raise taxes to keep murderers behind bars, to pay social workers to look after disabled people or to hire kindergarten teachers.

John nods his head. He had followed the debate.

"At first I thought, 'We need to do what we need to do,'" he says. But the more he learned about the state's budget, the more he questioned the need for more taxes.

Cook can relax. She has found some of her true believers.

While she's asking for their nod in the August 6 primary, she can look them in the eye and say she didn't vote for a single tax increase. She won't have to explain her stubborn "no" vote, which nearly led their treasured Shawnee Mission school district to cut teachers and programs next year.

Cook is proud of that "no" vote. But it enraged members of her own party, who have planted protest signs in yards throughout Cook's neighborhood.

"Elect Candidates Who Will Fund our Public Schools," read the blue-and-red posters stuck in lush green lawns.

They might as well say: "Screw Mary Pilcher Cook."

Not here. John says he'd be happy to put one of her signs in his front yard. He and his family would be proud to support the woman who is too conservative for some conservatives.

Mary Pilcher Cook just finished her first term as a member of the Kansas House of Representatives, driving to Topeka every weekday on behalf of 19,000 of her neighbors, the residents of the shabby duplexes along Johnson Drive as well as the shake-shingled minimansions along Widmer in northeastern Shawnee. She was tagged as a conservative from the day she drove her Mitsubishi 3000GT with its anti-abortion bumper stickers into the Capitol parking lot.

A lifelong resident of Shawnee, Cook spent ten years in an abusive marriage before escaping in 1984 with three kids and a job that paid $13,000 a year. She went to school at Avila, studying computer science and eventually earning her MBA there while working two jobs.

She met and married her current husband and went to work for a commodity news service now owned by Reuters Financial.

Cook also worked as a campaign volunteer for Phill Kline, who preceded her in the Statehouse. When Kline decided to run for U.S. Congress two years ago, Cook looked for a successor who would uphold his conservative ideals. "I was like, 'Phill, surely you've got someone to take your place,'" she remembers.

Kline didn't. Cook decided to run for the seat herself, though the timing wasn't particularly good. She still had a sixteen-year-old daughter at home, and her husband had just lost his job. (He now runs a mobile furniture-repair business out of their house.)

With Kline's support, Cook won the seat, taking her anti-abortion passion to Topeka. She says her feelings have been shaped by her own experience. Cook's eldest daughter got pregnant as a teen-ager. "She was terrified to come talk to me about it. We didn't have the best relationship," Cook says. When mother and daughter finally did talk, Cook's daughter said she'd been advised to end the pregnancy. "She told me every one of her friends told her to get an abortion." Cook's daughter has since married the father of her child.

Cook's time in Topeka has been a fit of social conservatism and anti-tax fervor. She cosponsored bills to put minimum-age requirements on common-law marriages, to keep property taxes low, to require parental notification for teen-agers seeking abortions and to cap state spending. She asked for a resolution directing Kansas Attorney General Carla Stovall to investigate the constitutionality of declaring that life begins at conception and another one urging Dennis Moore, Sam Brownback and the other members of the state's Congressional delegation to support President Bush's tax cuts.

In the process, Cook earned a zero rating by the Mainstream Coalition, a group of mainly middle-of-the-road Republicans who organized nine years ago to combat the growing Christian conservative voice in Kansas politics. The members of the group, which champions public schools and separation of church and state, rated politicians on ten of their votes (six of them related to abortion) the last session. Cook's was the only zero rating. Her Shawnee neighbor, moderate Republican Representative Lisa Benlon, received a 100 percent rating, voting Mainstream's way on all ten initiatives.

But Cook's efforts have been largely symbolic. Few of her bills passed the House, and those that did were killed by the Senate.