Elections ’88 : Orange County : Cox Surges to Front in 40th District : Ex-White House Counsel Waves Reagan’s Flag

Growing up in the suburbs of St. Paul, Minn., C. Christopher Cox dreamed of racing cars. It was in his blood.

His grandfather raced motorcycles, and his father drove sleek, high-powered sports cars as a professional driver at Riverside International Raceway and other tracks around the country. Intoxicated by the speed and glamour, the teen-ager longed to swap the stiff, wool uniform of the all-boys Catholic military academy he attended for a racing helmet.

The dream flickered and then went out when some of Cox’s boyhood idols died on the track, “but the desire to race and win never went away,” he said.

Entered a New Sport

So Cox moved west, entered college and began gravitating toward a new sport--politics.

Today, at 35, the Newport Beach attorney is in his first political race--the June 7 Republican primary in the 40th Congressional District. And to the amazement of many, he has steered his campaign from virtual obscurity past 11 other candidates to become the front-runner less than a week before the election.

Money, a slew of endorsements and an ideology embraced by many in the largely white, conservative 40th District have propelled Cox to the head of the pack just five months after he left the White House to launch his campaign.

In Washington, Cox, a Harvard Law School graduate, was senior associate counsel to President Reagan. And he has tied his race for the seat now held by retiring Rep. Robert E. Badham (R-Newport Beach) to his association with the man he calls “the greatest U.S. President in this century.” It is an understandable strategy, in view of the fact that 75% of the Orange County vote in the 1984 presidential election went to Reagan.

Cox’s drive to the front of the crowded GOP primary field in the 40th District has not been altogether smooth.

He has been labeled a “carpetbagger” and an “opportunist” for moving directly from Washington to enter the race, even though he lived in the district for eight years before his White House appointment in 1986. The other leading contenders in the race--Irvine City Councilman C. David Baker and Nathan Rosen

berg--portray Cox as an “East Coaster” swooping in to capture a congressional seat that is considered a plum by many conservatives. They argue that Cox has no grounding in local issues and few ties to a district of a half-million people that stretches from Fountain Valley to Newport Beach to Laguna Hills.

“He talks a good game, but what does he know about Orange County?” Baker asked at a recent candidates’ forum. “He’s been in Washington while we’ve been sitting in traffic.”

Even Cox’s remarkable success at raising campaign contributions has been clouded by complaints that 40% of the $505,000 he had banked as of May 18 came from outside Orange County. And in recent days, he has been roundly criticized for delivering several hard-hitting personal attacks on Baker and Rosenberg in the form of mailers.

Cox has chalked up his opponents’ attacks to jealousy and politics.

But he has had a much harder time brushing aside the embarrassing discovery that he failed to vote in November, 1984, for Reagan’s reelection. He also did not vote in the 1986 California June primary or the general election in November of that year.

In November, 1984, Cox was a partner in the Newport Beach office of the Los Angeles-based law firm of Latham & Watkins. He said recently that he was tied up in a business meeting at the firm’s offices in Los Angeles on Election Day and was unable to get back to Orange County in time to vote.

Cox said he moved to the Washington area in 1986 but wanted to keep his status as a registered voter in California. By the time he determined that, as a federal employee, he could do so even though he was living in Virginia, it was too late for him to arrange to vote in the California primary that year, he said.

In November, 1986, Cox said, he had expected to be in California on Election Day, but the trip was canceled because of White House business.

“To some Republicans, it may be the equivalent of political high treason,” longtime Orange County political consultant Harvey Englander said of Cox’s failure to vote in those elections.

Cox acknowledged that it “would have been better to vote . . . but I think my actions speak much louder than a single vote. I am a patriot.”

As a political candidate, Cox is a conservative, with a button-down, no-nonsense personality to match.

As a campaigner, he appears stiff, almost ill at ease when talking about himself. Fiercely private, he rarely smiles, though in recent weeks he has displayed flashes of humor that friends and campaign aides say is a Cox trademark. He never loosens his tie during an appearance, and his jet black hair is cropped short. His conversation is sprinkled with military terms like “the drill” and “hazardous duty.”

Cox has never married, though he has dated his current girlfriend for eight years.

Business associates and friends say he is tireless worker, often spending weekends and holidays sequestered with projects.

When he does get away, he plays golf, though he describes his game as average. “An 18 handicap when the wind is right,” he said.

He reads the requisite conservative journals, the National Review among them. He also escapes with fiction, as he did last summer when, “for kicks,” he bought and read all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

Since January, however, Cox has been in political overdrive.

“This campaign is very important to me,” he said. “I want to win, plain and simple.”

Until Badham announced that he would not seek a seventh term in Congress, Cox said, he had no intention of leaving the White House until next January, when Reagan’s term ends.

He had been offered the job at the White House after several years of involvement in Republican activities at the state and national levels and decided to take it, he said, because he had “reached a crossroads.” He was working too many hours at Latham & Watkins, he said, and his desire to get more deeply into GOP politics was growing stronger.

Then, last January, during a personal call from a college chum, Cox learned of Badham’s retirement.

“I sat there and daydreamed for a couple of hours,” Cox recalled. Then the phone started ringing, he said, as friends and political contacts both within and outside the district began calling, urging him to run. When state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) decided not to seek the seat, Cox jumped in.

If he wins the race in the 40th District, which is so solidly Republican that a victory in the GOP primary next week is tantamount to winning the general election, Cox is expected to toe the Reagan line on everything from taxes to abortion to Central America.

He opposes any tax increase, including a half-cent state sales tax in Orange County to finance new roads.

As a White House attorney, Cox said, he was involved in establishing and defending legal guidelines that were intended to implement a law preventing family-planning clinics from using federal funds to help women obtain abortions. A federal judge in Boston blocked those guidelines from taking effect in March.

He strongly supports military aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and would back plans to send U.S. troops to Honduras as a deterrent to Sandinista incursions into that country.

On the issue of the budget deficit, Cox has called for a complete overhaul of the budget process. He supports a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget and believes that Congress should establish a ceiling on spending before drafting each federal budget.

Lawmakers, he said, currently decide how much to spend on individual programs and worry about the overall size of the budget at the end of the process, rather than at the beginning.

Cox said he believes the solution to the county’s transportation crisis is unlocking tens of thousands of dollars in federal funds earmarked for the county. He has proposed allocating the county’s share of the $2 billion in annual federal highway taxes in the form of an annual lump sum. Much of that money, Cox said, now goes to offset the budget deficit, and he believes that it should be given to county officials.

If the countywide slow-growth initiative passes, Cox predicted that it will not solve the area’s transportation problem as intended by its sponsors because it provides no new money for roads.

Nonetheless, Cox has not taken a position on the measure, saying growth is not a federal issue but a matter for “home rule.”

Despite the soaring demand for more commercial airline service in the county, Cox is opposed to joint military and commercial use of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. One solution to the county’s air travel needs, he said, might be construction of a series of smaller, regional airports, which would require less land and have a reduced impact on the surrounding population than one large facility, like Los Angeles International Airport.

To reach Congress, Cox has gone to great lengths to woo GOP voters in the district with a list of endorsements that reads like a national “Who’s Who” from the right and far right.

Among his backers are former U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork, Nicaraguan Contra leader Adolfo Calero, author William F. Buckley Jr. and former Lt. Col. Oliver North, who is under indictment for his role in the Iran-Contra affair. Bork has stumped for Cox in the district and North is scheduled to make a series of local fund-raising appearances Thursday on Cox’s behalf.

Cox often refers to Bork, North and other conservative ideologues as “soul mates.”

In the White House, Cox was one of the architects of Reagan’s failed strategy to win Senate confirmation for Bork, according to Frank Lavin, Reagan’s White House director of political affairs.

“I deal with a lot of congressional candidates, good conservative Republicans who, if elected, would serve the party and the movement well,” Lavin said in a telephone interview. “But Chris is different. He’s a leader, who in two or three terms in the House could make a significant impact on the wide body of Congress.”

One of five children, Cox, a Catholic, attended high school at a military academy in St. Paul. He earned a bachelor’s degree, majoring in English and political science, in three years at USC. At Harvard, he was graduated with a law degree and a master’s degree in business administration.

During Reagan’s first run for the presidency, Cox helped form “Harvard Students for Reagan.”

In 1978, Cox was hired by Latham & Watkins and six years later became a partner.

Despite his professional demands, Cox found time to win notice among conservatives. He helped draft position papers on how to defeat former California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

A student of Russian at USC, Cox said he decided years ago that it was important for Americans to know what information was being disseminated to Soviet citizens by the government in Moscow. But when he searched for an English translation of the official Soviet Communist Party newspaper, he could find none.

As a result, in 1984 he launched a company that prints an English-language version of that newspaper, Pravda.

Cox’s campaign strategy, however, needs no translation.

He said he believes Reagan’s continuing popularity in Orange County is strong enough to lift him into Congress.

His campaign signs bear a simple message. “Thank you, Chris Cox,” they say in cursive lettering, over a facsimile of Reagan’s signature.

He has labored long and hard to paint himself as the man who will carry Reagan’s political torch long after the President leaves the White House. Cox even went to court in an attempt to change his occupation designation on the official ballot from “White House Counsel” to “Senior Associate Counsel to President Reagan,” but he lost.

He is not the only White House alumnus attempting to use his Reagan Administration job as a springboard to elective office.

In the 42nd Congressional District, the candidates include former Reagan speech writer Dana Rohrabacher and former White House aide Andrew Littlefair.

Reagan has made it a policy not to endorse candidates in any Republican primaries and has not made an exception for Cox.

“It seems that former presidential appointees are falling into two categories,” said one White House aide, who still works for the President. “Either they write books and take cheap shots at Reagan, or they run for office and sing his praise, hoping against hope that the Reagan magic still twinkles bright.”

C. CHRISTOPHER COX

40th Congressional District

Office sought: 40th Congressional District representative. The district includes Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Irvine, Costa Mesa and parts of Huntington Beach, Tustin, Fountain Valley and Santa Ana, as well as a portion of unincorporated southern Orange County.

Occupation: Lawyer.

Party Affiliation: Republican.

Age: 35

Residence: Newport Beach

Public office previously held: None.