San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
GOP’s Cox a candidate who blasts politicians
The California governor’s race may look like a battle between two wealthy men, but Republican businessman John Cox says there’s one big difference between him and his Democratic opponent, Gavin Newsom: “I struggled.”
Cox, 63, mentions his roots in virtually every campaign appearance, usually with the shorthand, “I was raised by a single mom on the South Side of Chicago.”
The longhand is more complex.
His father did abandon the family when Cox was a baby, but his mother then married another man who was present for much of Cox’s youth — and often beat him. He identified with his mother, and the political corruption he says he saw through her eyes contributed to his view as an adult that professional politicians are destroying the system.
That feeling gnawed at him for years, eventually inspiring him to run for office four times — losing every time — and pay for a couple of anti-politician initiatives that never
made the ballot.
Cox’s mind wasn’t on politics as he grew up in Illinois. Since he was in seventh grade, he said, he wanted to be a lawyer. He liked to argue, and he wanted to have a more secure financial life than his mother, a schoolteacher, and his stepfather, a postal worker. He worked two jobs to pay his way through community college and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He worked as an accountant to put himself through law school.
Cox says the fact that he had to work hard as a young man makes it easier for him to relate to the 1 in 5 Californians living in poverty.
“I had to work my way through college. I didn’t get a scholarship. I didn't have money to start my own business. I had to build capital day by day, ever single day,” Cox said on The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast, “The struggles I had growing up give me a feeling of empathy for people who are struggling today. I had to worry about where my next meal was coming from. I had to worry about being able to pay the rent.”
But Cox’s empathy for the poor doesn’t translate into wanting to increase funding for public education or move toward a universal health care system. Instead, Cox is a mainline conservative on economic issues who believes that removing government regulations will help lower costs for everyone.
On social issues, he’s a devout Roman Catholic who opposes abortion rights and the death penalty, but says he would enforce laws governing both. And although he says he didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016, he’s come around — he gladly accepted the president’s endorsement before the June primary, and he backs Trump’s plan for a wall along the Mexican border.
Cox wasn’t always that conservative. Then again, he wasn’t always John Cox.
He was born John Kaplan. His father abandoned the family when Cox was 3 months old. He believes his mother “was impregnated against her will,” which helps to explain his opposition to abortion even if a pregnancy results from rape.
“My mom would tell me that if abortion had been legal, she would have aborted me, probably,” Cox said. “And I think I had a right to live.”
His mother remarried before he was 4 years old, and he took the last name of his stepfather. That’s also when the family left the South Side and moved to the suburbs. Cox said the man beat him, but not the two children he fathered by Cox’s mother.
“We all go through difficult times in our lives and we all overcome them,” Cox said. “The good news is that (his stepfather) worked nights at the post office, so I didn’t see him much.”
His mother, Priscilla Cox, worked as a school librarian and reading teacher at schools in the city. She felt that many of the principals were unqualified and owed their jobs to their political connections with the local aldermen. It made an impression on her son.
“I saw firsthand the corruption in those schools. And it put the notion in me that is something that I had to fight against,” Cox said.
His mother was a Democrat, and as a boy, Cox used to put on a white shirt and tie and do impressions of John F. Kennedy, whom his mother idolized. And it was as a Democrat that Cox got his first taste of politics.
At 21, he ran to be a delegate to the 1976 Democratic National Convention for Jimmy Carter. He and a slate of fellow reformers lost, he said, squashed by Chicago Mayor
John Cox, Republican candidate for governor Richard J. Daley’s Democratic machine.
Soon after voting for Carter, Cox began to lose his affinity for the Democrats. He was just beginning his accounting and legal career, and was appalled by how much people were paying in taxes. He gravitated toward Ronald Reagan’s brand of low-tax small government, and in particular, the free market philosophy of New York Rep. Jack Kemp. Cox served on Kemp’s national steering committee for his 1988 Republican presidential campaign, and his interest in politics grew.
He began running for office himself in Illinois, this time as a Republican. He ran for Congress, for Cook County recorder of deeds, and for the U.S. Senate in 2004, when one of his opponents was a state legislator named Barack Obama. In 2008, he even briefly ran for president — “a bit of a lark,” he said, mostly to protest President George W. Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War.
His motivation for running remained the same in each race: to fight the influence of money in politics.
“I think corruption is the biggest evil of our time,” Cox said. “I wanted to get the money out of politics. I wanted people to have affordable housing and affordable health care. I believe these things happen when we have a robust free market.”
At first, his views on immigration were more in line with Kemp’s. Cox recalled that Kemp admired how “people came here and started their own business and grabbed a piece of the American dream. That’s the secret sauce. That’s the reason this country has done so much better than any country in the world. We’ve welcomed immigrants to our shores.”
Cox’s view on immigration changed, however, when he moved to San Diego in 2011 in search of warmer weather with his second wife, Sarah, and their young daughter. (Cox has three daughters with his first wife. Their marriage of 22 years was annulled.)
“Now I live in San Diego and I see the drugs and the gangs and the human trafficking that goes on there,” Cox said. Trump’s wall may not solve all the problems, he said, but it would help.
And something appealed to him about California’s political system: the initiative process. No longer could the Democratic political machine block his anti-corruption ideas. Now — after building a legal, accounting and real estate empire with assets of more than $200 million — he could open his own wallet to take his anti-corruption message directly to the people.
“I thought, ‘Gee, maybe some of my ideas about getting money out of politics and working against corruption could work in California, because you can do ballot initiatives and change the Constitution,’ ” he said.
In 2016, he spent more than $373,000 on an unsuccessful attempt to qualify a ballot measure to force politicians to wear the corporate logos of their top donors when they appear at official functions — similar to how NASCAR drivers sport their sponsors’ logos. He got the idea from a Bill Maher comedy bit.
Cox said it was a way to show the “absurdity” of the influence that wealthy people and unions have on the political system. Yet Cox illustrates the outsize power of that influence.
Of the more than $8 million Cox has raised for his gubernatorial campaign, $5.5 million has come from Cox himself. Last year, he spent $2 million on another measure that didn’t make the ballot, one that would have had voters elect as many as 12,000 local representatives to advise the 120 members of the Legislature in Sacramento.
He said the effort was crafted to deal with the state’s biggest problem — how “the political class” isn’t helping ordinary Californians.
It has become the core of his message: Democrats, who hold all the political power in California, are responsible for the state’s high poverty rate, skyrocketing homeless population and exploding housing prices.
“This is a wonderful place to live. There’s a thin layer of people who are doing well. But most everybody else is struggling,” Cox said. “They’re working two jobs. Saving almost no money. Living in crackerbox apartments, paying though the nose for rents. This is no way to run a state, and the political class here doesn’t want to answer to it.”
In early 2016, Cox started making plans to run for governor because, “I wanted to have a say in running the state. I thought my business expertise, and the experiences that I had growing up, coming up from nothing, would give people some comfort that I had empathy for people who are struggling. Because I struggled.”
But Cox’s prescriptions for how to fix California’s problems are heavier on critique than solutions. The policy section on his campaign website wasn’t fleshed out with meatier proposals until midSeptember. Even now, it seems more focused on criticizing Newsom than on explaining what Cox would do as governor. Here’s the entirety of the section of the policy agenda on homelessness:
In Gavin Newsom’s San Francisco, the playgrounds are littered with drug needles and the sidewalks are covered with human feces. Instead of fixing the root problem, they’ve just hired $130,000 a year “poop police” to walk around the city with shovels. That’s not a policy, it’s an admission of defeat.
Unlike other states, the majority of those on California streets are there simply because they’ve been priced out of their homes. By rapidly increasing the supply of affordable housing, we can help those people help themselves, and then focus on treatment options for the mentally ill and substance addicts. Two different problems. Two different solutions. John Cox will prioritize them both.
To Cox, no one personifies the inactivity and indifference of the political class better than Newsom, the former San Francisco mayor who he says was “born with a silver spoon in his mouth” — a portrayal that isn’t entirely accurate.
Newsom’s father, Bill Newsom, was a judge whose connections to the wealthy Getty family helped fund his son’s business empire. But Newsom’s parents were divorced when he was 2 years old and he was raised by his mother, Tessa, who worked three jobs when he was growing up. Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a partial baseball scholarship and student loans, and worked as well.
Much like the story of Cox’s early life, the longhand is complex.
“I had to work my way through college. I didn’t get a scholarship . ... The struggles I had growing up give me a feeling of empathy for people who are struggling today. I had to worry about where my next meal was coming from.”
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli