Rendell's 'pit bull at the front door'

HARRISBURG - Standing off on the sideline, her lips drawn into a tight line, state policy czar Donna Cooper was clearly displeased.

Before her, in an unusual political declaration, Gov. Rendell - her boss - was insisting in response to questions at a news conference that he, and not Cooper, made the decisions in his administration.

As he banged his fist on the lectern for emphasis, Cooper said nothing. And after Rendell was done, she made a swift and quiet exit.

It was about as subtle as Cooper gets. And she is not a subtle character. Not in anyone's estimation.

Aside from the governor himself, the longtime Philadelphia resident is perhaps the most controversial member of the Rendell administration. She is either idolized or detested, and the mere mention of her name evokes a powerful - almost visceral - reaction from lawmakers, rank-and-file state workers, and lobbyists.

Part of that is the nature of her job. As one of the chief architects of state policy and a key player behind the crafting of a state budget, she wields tremendous power and is a natural lightning rod for criticism.

Yet with Cooper, it goes beyond that. It is a style thing - maybe even a personality thing.

Her fans call her scary smart - a hard-charging professional with a command of the issues who is driven by a deeply ingrained activist streak and a fervent belief that ordinary people can make a difference through public service.

Critics complain that she is brash, domineering, and argumentative, with a deep-seated disdain for the legislature and a grating arrogance that she is right - even when she isn't - and everyone else is the bogeyman.

Cooper, 50, has heard it all, down to the unflattering adjective used to describe high-powered, aggressive women. Still, she seems surprised, even stung, by the criticism.

"It's hard for me to understand it, because I don't see myself that way," she said in a recent interview in her Harrisburg office.

In her view, any misunderstanding about who she is and how she acts comes down to a language problem: She speaks Philly - loud, direct, with attitude and expletives - and Harrisburg doesn't.

"You could meet with me, and we could have a lovely meeting," Cooper said, "but you got [hustled] the entire time. I feel that democracy works better when everybody is basically honest."

Rendell, who once referred to Cooper as "a Sandinista with charm," said it was neither in Cooper's job description nor in her nature to coddle. He doesn't want her to, either.

"I wouldn't change her, because it would take away a small degree of her passion. . . . She really is the conscience of the administration," he said.

As Rendell's policy chief for the last 61/2 years, and a lieutenant in his mayoral administration before that, Cooper has serious sway.

In Harrisburg, she has conceptualized and executed some of Rendell's biggest-ticket agenda items, particularly on education. Her fingerprints - or fist-prints, depending on whom you ask - are all over battles to secure more funding for early-childhood education, to decrease class sizes, and to put more computers in public schools.

She also has driven the administration's push to ease inequities in state funding and steadily increase annual state subsidies for public schools.

Beyond education, Cooper is a behind-the-scenes force behind every state budget negotiation and has delved into almost all policy matters, including health care, welfare, and taxes. On almost all those issues, she falls pretty far left of center - more so than the governor and most others in his administration.

But it is less her political leanings than her style and approach that make her one of the most hotly debated figures in Rendell's cabinet.

"She'll listen to what you have to say, but she's got her mind made up and she'll never change it," said Rep. John Perzel (R., Phila.), the former House speaker.

Noted Sen. Anthony Williams (D., Phila.): All governors "have pit bulls at the front door."

Last month, Williams questioned Cooper's qualifications to set education policy. After that, he was stonewalled by the governor's office. "And that's my frustration," he said. "If you disagree with them, they take it to a different place."

Cooper's penchant for polemics certainly didn't start at home in Oreland, Montgomery County.

The youngest child of jewelers, the most radical thing she did, while in the sixth grade, was organize a sit-in to protest her school's policy of not allowing girls to wear pants.

In high school, she was a cheerleader - captain of the squad, in fact. In college, she was an accounting major.

"I was as straight and narrow as they frigging come," Cooper joked with a booming laugh. "I mean, I was practically a Republican."

That changed in her junior year at Ithaca (N.Y.) College, when she took a semester abroad and traveled with a nonprofit organization to the Indonesian island of Bali to help preserve its local culture.

"I was living in a hut with no running water, and people were sick and dying in their 30s, and there were no schools, and I was just like, 'What?' " she said. "My mind was really blown."

She never really outgrew that sense of outrage.

When she returned to the United States in 1979, she became an activist, and during the next half-decade she became deeply entrenched in the "No Nukes" movement in Washington and New York as a researcher and protest organizer. She later joined women's and peace and social-justice groups in Philadelphia.

After years in the trenches, she took a break to attend graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute for Government. The move ended up launching her career in government: She went to work for the city, overseeing programs for youth, seniors, and the homeless.

She took time off in 1991 to run the City Council campaign of a friend from the city's Kensington section. That's when she first met Rendell, who was campaigning for mayor.

"She was tough as nails," recalled David L. Cohen, Rendell's mayoral chief of staff.

"I always said if there was ever a street fight between Donna and some of these hardscrabble political icons in Kensington, you'd at least have to put even money on Donna," Cohen added of the 5-foot-2 Cooper.

Her candidate lost, and Cooper returned to her city job.

But Cohen remembered her. She was put in charge of some of the administration's biggest initiatives, including implementing the federal welfare-to-work requirements and putting 8,000 women to work.

In many ways, those were the golden days for Cooper: "In Philly, the difference is that people basically agree on what the problems are. Like, OK, the streets are dirty, the schools need to be better, the city needs a bigger downtown. Then there's this argument about how you do it."

That wasn't the landscape when she landed in Harrisburg in 2003. The legislature was dominated by Republicans, and it took several months of trial and error for Cooper and other top Rendell staffers to figure out how to best deal with them politically. Some lawmakers complain they still haven't figured it out.

From the moment she arrived in the Capitol, Cooper made waves.

John Estey, Rendell's former chief of staff in Harrisburg and a friend of Cooper's, said he believed that part of what makes some people blanch is that she's a woman in a building with few women in positions of power.

"There are some people there who haven't been conditioned to the presence of really strong - consistently strong - women," said Rosemary Greco, a senior adviser to Rendell on health care.

Cooper was not an ornament, either. Rendell cut her a wide berth and listened to her advice, at times to the detriment of reaching a compromise. A few times, according to interviews with lawmakers and their staff, she blew up deals by changing the governor's mind at the last minute.

And legislators here do not forget slights.

Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo put it this way: "She's the T.O. of the administration - talented on the field, but divisive in the locker room."

Rendell acknowledged there are times Cooper is kept out of the room during "the most intimate negotiations . . . because there are some people who won't tolerate her being in there."

Those who have dealt with her say she's professional, but never diplomatic. When preparing for a meeting, she exhaustively studies an issue, and then pummels the other side with questions. She can be impatient and imperious.

"I'm not sure anybody looks forward to sitting down with Donna," said one longtime lobbyist who asked not to be identified for fear of damaging his relationship with her. "She's forceful and demanding, and takes the 'it's my way or the highway' approach."

During a recent meeting with representatives from the pharmaceutical industry who were upset that one of their drugs had been dropped from the state's formulary, she admitted, she started off by declaring: "All you guys in the pharmaceutical world would have more credibility if you stopped pushing drugs down everybody's throat."

Why put someone on the defensive like that?

"You have to understand . . . we are rougher and more aggressive in Philly," said Cooper, who lives in Fishtown with her husband, Arthur Meckler, and commutes to Harrisburg. "And much of the state has a much more polite, Midwestern way. So what I would call debating, they would call argumentative."

That doesn't bother Rendell. He says he implicitly trusts her judgment. And though he does not always follow her advice, he said he could not imagine his tenure in the Capitol without her.

"Donna is the one person I could not afford to lose," Rendell said. "I'll carry on as long as Donna is there."