Kansas politics bleeds two shades of red

TOPEKA -- Laura Ostrowski was "not particularly excited" about John McCain.

Rocking her infant son, Matthias, in a sling at the Kansans for Life office here, Ostrowski says she didn't like McCain's support for research on human embryonic stem cells, which she sees as abortion. She saw the Republican as the lesser of two evils.

Then Sarah Palin came along.

"She's somebody a lot of women can identify with. She's a mom. She works. She's conservative," Ostrowski, 23, says of the Alaska governor. "It made me feel I was voting for him rather than against Obama."

Kansas politics may match the color of Dorothy's ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz, but Republicans in her home state come in two shades of red that often clash. At one end of the spectrum are social conservatives who protest at abortion clinics and push to teach creationism in school. At the other are pro-business moderates who have crossed over to vote for centrist Democrats such as Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

"McCain has really bridged that divide," says Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. "The country club set really like McCain, and values voters really like Palin."

Until the Arizona senator chose Palin as his running mate, the Republican rift briefly raised the possibility that Barack Obama could become the first Democrat to carry Kansas since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Enthusiasm ran highest in January, when Obama, whose mother grew up in Kansas, visited his grandfather's hometown of El Dorado.

The connection helped Obama defeat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the caucuses. It also energized Democrats, who have registered twice as many new voters as Republicans have this year. Voter registration ends today. As of Sept. 1, the GOP had 751,125 voters on its rolls, well ahead of the Democrats' 451,577.

"For the general election," Kansas State University political scientist Joseph Aistrup says, "the question is not whether McCain wins, but by how much."

In February, the forecast was: not much. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee trounced the presumed Republican nominee by 36 percentage points in the Republican caucuses.

Mary Alice Phillips, 53, a nurse from Wamego who has nine children, two of them disabled, had heard about Palin on websites opposed to abortion rights because of her decision to keep her youngest child, Trig, after a prenatal test showed he had Down syndrome. Phillips says she might not have voted if McCain had chosen as a running mate someone who supported abortion rights, but Palin "reassured me about the Republican ticket."

Some moderate Republicans are put off by Palin.

"There is a strong but silent majority who still have reservations," says Ryan Wright of the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority, whose members were recently ousted from the state national committee as too moderate. "One thing the last eight years has taught us is we don't want another inexperienced person in the White House," he says.

Wright fears moderate Republicans may vote for Obama or not vote at all, hurting other candidates on the ticket.

State Senate President Stephen Morris, a Republican from Hugoton, has heard "a few people grumble" about Palin but says "even if they don't agree with all her social ideas, they think it makes the ticket more exciting."

Democrats also are wound up about Palin. A notice at party headquarters in Lawrence asks, "Who is Sarah Palin?" Among the answers: "a contestant in more beauty pageants than elections." Actually, Palin competed in two pageants and ran for office six times before McCain picked her.

Tess Banion, a Lawrence Democrat who backed Clinton and now supports Obama, isn't impressed by Palin's feminist credentials. "She so does not reflect my values that I could never vote for her," says Banion, 57. She says Republican friends who support abortion rights are distraught. She says, "One woman told me, 'I'm so sick of voting for Democrats. I thought this time I could get to vote for a Republican.' "

Still, this state is hardly a stop on the road to the White House. More Kansans are likely to have followed "The Road to Oz," Highway 99, to Oztoberfest in Wamego than have laid eyes on a national candidate this fall.

At the Oz Museum, where author L. Frank Baum is celebrated as a feminist for his strong heroines such as Dorothy Gale, sentiment is mixed on the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket.

Kim Ross, 51, "Toto's trainer" for the annual musical, is a Democrat from Belvue. She says Republicans are "pandering" to her, "saying any woman is as good as another." She says Palin's short résumé "makes me nervous."

Museum manager Ellie Coots, 34, a conservative Republican who is "not rah-rah" for McCain, says Palin shares the Midwestern values embodied in Oz. "Alaska's a big state right next to Russia," Coots says. "She probably has a lot more experience than people give her credit for."