Rep. Cox Bucks ‘Get Along, Go Along,’ Eyes Senate Seat : Politics: O.C. congressman, whose rhetoric is principled if not always prudent, would face tough primary fight.

It was well past 4 a.m., and the House was still in session. Exhausted lawmakers slumped in their seats as the debate over a $151-billion transportation package droned on.

Amid the huzzahs over jobs, economic growth and the invective over the legislation’s cost, one element was missing: The 486-page bill itself was still being frantically pieced together by aides.

By the time the House passed the legislation 372-47, only a handful of lawmakers had read one word of it.

To Rep. Christopher Cox, a young Newport Beach Republican then serving his second term in Congress, the events of that late November morning two years ago represented all that is wrong with the United States Congress. Lawmakers literally were deciding the fate of tens of billions of the taxpayers’ dollars on the strength of a nod and a handshake.

Two years later, Cox is thinking hard about making a move to the other side of the Capitol. He has written two letters to his financial supporters, informing them that he is planning to seek the Republican nomination for the seat held by Democrat Dianne Feinstein. Rep. Michael Huffington, a millionaire businessman from Santa Barbara, announced last week that he will seek the Republican nomination.

For the past several weeks, Cox has met with party leaders throughout California to seek advice and support. Should he decide to risk his safe congressional seat, Cox has the endorsements from two former Senate candidates--Bruce Herschensohn and Ed Zschau--as well as former President Reagan’s Housing secretary, Jack Kemp.

At this pivotal point in Cox’s career, his reaction to the early morning debate in 1991 serves to take his measure as both a lawmaker and politician.

A graduate of both the Harvard law and business schools, the 40-year-old Cox is described by even his critics as brilliant. He has a reputation on Capitol Hill as a button-down, economic conservative whose anti-tax, anti-spending rhetoric is highly principled, if not always politically prudent.

The transportation bill is a case in point. Even though the legislation contained $4.1 million for road work in and near Cox’s own Orange County district, he voted against the bill, largely because he was incensed that the House would debate and approve such important legislation literally under the cloak of darkness.

A few weeks after the bill passed, Cox went public with his criticism, a serious sin in the eyes of House veterans who were weaned on Sam Rayburn’s advice: “To get along, go along.”

The Orange County Republican wrote a scathing piece for Human Events, the conservative journal, that attacked the entire Congress for the way it had handled the transportation bill.

“Informed debate and factual exposition have been replaced by misinformation and chaos,” Cox wrote. Then he went on to quote a friend, conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke, who has referred to the U.S. Congress as a “Parliament of Whores.” The allusion did not endear the Orange County congressman to the other lodgers at the bordello.

“That (was) not a way to make friends and influence people on that (public works) committee,” Cox acknowledges. But “there’s a ‘get along, go along’ M.O. there that I wasn’t willing to cooperate with. And I thought I was reasonably polite . . . about the way I did it.”

But critics, including some of his colleagues, see it differently. Several top congressional staffers, who were unwilling to be named, said that they see in Cox a certain aloofness, an unwillingness to accept the traditional Washington ways, that they believe borders on arrogance.

Cox’s Harvard degrees, his earnest good looks, and his habitually impeccable appearance (white shirt, red tie, dark business suit) do not dispel the impression of a man that Marshall McLuhan might have described as terminally cool.

The congressman is meticulous in professional matters as well. When he wanted to augment the congressional salary of his first chief of staff (and former law school classmate) Robert Sutcliffe by also retaining Sutcliffe as a legal adviser to his campaign organization, Cox sought--and received--an authorizing letter from the House ethics committee.

And he took pains to secure and keep readily available copies of his Selective Service records, which show that he gave up a college deferment during the Vietnam War, but drew a lottery number sufficiently high to avoid induction.

“The one thing you have to keep in mind about Congressman Cox is that he takes this job super seriously,” said an aide to another Orange County congressman. “When a city in Orange County comes in and says, ‘We need help with this project,’ we say, ‘What do you need?’ What Cox will do is rewrite the entire proposal and tell them, ‘This is how you ought to do it.’ ”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and others who know Cox insist that the quality that some mistake for arrogance is simply a burning drive to get it right. And they say his year-old marriage to a former White House colleague, and the birth of his son last spring, have given Cox a more human quality.

When Charles Christopher Cox came to Congress in January, 1989, after serving as senior associate legal counsel to President Ronald Reagan, he joined a cadre of conservative Orange County congressmen known as much for their polemics as their politics.

Cox’s deliberate, lawyerly style soon set him apart from the more flamboyant personas of Reps. Robert K. Dornan, William E. Dannemeyer and Rohrabacher.

Rather than concentrating on the conservative social agenda, Cox set to work on more arcane economic issues. While Dornan, Dannemeyer and Rohrabacher railed about abortion, homosexuality and obscene art, Cox set out to reform the federal budget process, an endeavor in which he has achieved a measure of success.

So far, more than 150 members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have signed on to his Budget Process Reform Act, legislation that may have a chance of moving despite its Republican sponsorship.

Cox also waged an unsuccessful fight to trim the appropriations bill that funds the House of Representatives, contending that the Democrat-majority congressional staff is bloated and inefficient. And Cox tried to cut the budget of the General Accounting Office by 25%, echoing complaints by other Republicans that the work of the agency, which functions as the investigative arm of Congress, could be carried out more impartially and less expensively by private accounting firms.

Despite his silence on the right wing’s hot-button social issues, Cox is rated highly by conservative organizations.

“He’s a very solid conservative, but within a framework of always looking for a solution, not just being against things,” says House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who himself has been widely accused of being a bomb thrower instead of a coalition builder.

Even Orange County Democrats, while disagreeing with Cox’s conservative politics, say that the Newport Beach congressman is dramatically less partisan than other members of the county’s congressional delegation, especially Rohrabacher and Dornan.

Cox, for example, gave most of the Clinton Inaugural tickets assigned to his office to Howard Adler, chairman of the Democratic Party of Orange County, so Adler could parcel them out to supporters of Bill Clinton who wanted to come to Washington. And Cox played host at a reception on Inauguration Day for Orange County residents who had traveled to the capital for Clinton’s swearing-in ceremony. Dornan, one of Clinton’s harshest critics, stayed at home and worked on his income tax forms.

“I think (Cox) is a spectacularly good congressman,” said Eugene C. Gratz, the Laguna Beach Democrat whom Cox handily defeated in the 1990 general election.

“He’s is friendly, he is welcoming and (concerning his constituents) he is completely nonpartisan,” he said.

“I have had some matters that needed consideration in Washington, as have other well-known Democratic friends of mine, and he has been as quick to serve us as I imagine he would be his own supporters. . . . As a politician, (however), I think he’s somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan,” Gratz said.

Not everyone in Orange County is a fan, however.

Two years ago, Cox angered environmentalists who were seeking to block construction of the San Joaquin Hills toll road. The project required an exemption to a federal law that prohibits the use of federal funds to build highways through parklands.

Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside), who represents southern Orange County, drafted legislation, ultimately approved by Congress, that gave the toll road the necessary exemption.

Cox told environmentalists who were upset with Packard that he could do better.

“He was very cordial and very nice when we met with him in his office. We got a lot of encouragement,” said Laguna Beach activist Beth Leeds. “Basically, what he said was that (the toll road) shouldn’t be exempted, and then, of course, the turnaround came and it got exempted.”

Added Norm Grossman, a spokesman for a coalition of environmental groups that sought to block the exemption: “Mr. Cox cleverly positioned himself so he could look innocent. He let Ron Packard do all the dirty work, and then he stands off to the side.”

Cox has also been cautious in the way he has handled the volatile issue of closing the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in his district. Initially supportive of the Pentagon’s plan to close the air station to save money, Cox said he changed his mind when Department of Defense figures indicated to him that it would cost more to close the base than to keep it open.

Now, as the debate turns to what to do with the base after the Marines leave, his posture has been to be watchful but not intervene. “I feel very strongly that the federal government ought not to engage in local land-use planning,” Cox said.

“My personal view is that an airport ought not to go there if the citizens in the surrounding communities don’t want it,” he said.

Laguna Hills Councilman Randal J. Bressette, who fought to keep El Toro open and now is a member of a South County coalition trying to take control of planning the future use of the base, endorses Cox’s approach.

“He’s taken a very intelligent approach to the El Toro issue,” Bressette said. “I think it’s a wise person who first investigates the facts before making a decision. He’s proven to be very wise.”

Cox’s non-confrontational style, say his friends, dates to his youth in Minnesota, where he grew up amid the tempering influences of a Roman Catholic theology steeped in the Democratic Farmer-Labor movement, and a tightly knit Midwestern family with strong California roots.

The future congressman was born Oct. 16, 1952, in St. Paul, the German and Irish Catholic counterpart to the more Protestant and Scandinavian Minneapolis. His parents were the former Marilyn Miller and Charles Christopher Cox.

From a base in Southern California, Cox’s paternal grandparents published Roman Catholic magazines in association with a religious order that had branches in Texas and Minnesota. The Cox family maintained a house near St. Paul, where Cox’s father spent many of his summers. Next door to the Cox summer cottage was the home where Marilyn Miller grew up.

After Cox’s grandfather died, his father inherited the publishing business. (Years later, Congressman Cox and his father would for a time publish the only daily English-language translation of Pravda, the Soviet newspaper.)

Cox grew up in Highland Park, an upper-middle-class neighborhood of St. Paul. He was the third of five children, and the only boy.

In 1966, Cox entered St. Thomas Academy, an all-male Roman Catholic military school in the St. Paul suburbs, where, like many other young men, he joined the U.S. Army’s junior Reserve Officer Training Corps.

At St. Thomas, at least in the early days, Cox was known as somewhat of a “party animal,” recalls longtime friend Timothy J. Pabst, now a St. Paul attorney.

He was on the school’s swim team, played soccer, sang in the chorus, served as a member of the crack drill squad, and acted as editor of the school yearbook.

But as Cox fixed on his goal of returning to Southern California and attending USC, “all of a sudden, he decided that (improving his academic performance) was something he wanted to do,” Pabst recalls. “And for sure, his last year, perhaps his last two years, he did very, very well.”

Cox, who had earned the rank of first lieutenant in the junior ROTC, arrived at the University of Southern California in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War.

But he did not enlist. Like every other young man who matriculated at college that fall, he was granted a student deferment that would keep him out of the draft as long as he stayed in school. It was the last year that the Selective Service granted college deferments.

In January, 1972, Cox decided to give up the deferment. “I did some serious thinking about how I wanted to schedule events in my life,” Cox recalled in an interview.

“Given that I had finished this ROTC program and I could go in (to the Army, if drafted) as a junior officer, I decided to drop my student deferment and just go into the (lottery) pool and see whether or not I got drafted. . . . I didn’t like the idea of having this big question mark hanging over my head.”

Cox and the rest of the nation’s young men born on Oct. 16 drew the number 159 in the 1972 draft lottery. The highest number reached that year by the Selective Service inductors was 95. He was never called up.

The future congressman finished USC in three years, largely, he says, as the result of accumulating extra credits from constantly changing his major. He began as a student of mathematics, switched to engineering, then changed to English and ultimately, political science.

With good grades and a diverse academic background, Cox was accepted at Harvard Law School. In his first year, he won admission to the prestigious four-year program that offered dual Harvard degrees--an M.B.A. from the business school and a J.D. from the law school.

He immediately found himself one of the few conservatives in what he describes as a bastion of left-wing orthodoxy. The intellectual atmosphere was, Cox recalls, “oppressive.”

“The debates were never between Republicans and Democrats,” Cox says. “They were between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. . . . (Even) liberal Democrats were way too mainstream.”

In the end, Cox says, it was the liberal thinking at Harvard that helped to shore up his conviction that conservative policies made the most sense.

Cox’s politics did not prevent him from making the law review, where associates remember him for his wit and affability.

“He was very well liked in law school,” says Susan Estrich, the liberal Democrat who managed Michael Dukakis’ unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1988. Now a law professor at USC, Estrich was president of the Harvard Law Review when Cox served on the board of editors.

“I probably disagree with him on most issues, but (Cox) is somebody I’ve always gotten along with and enjoyed,” Estrich said.

“I have met some (conservatives) who are so ideologically over there that they just can’t deal with people who are not members of the same temple, and he is not one of those . . .

“Bob Dornan can’t have a conversation with me without beginning to fume. I don’t think of Chris as that kind of person,” she said.

After he received his joint Harvard degrees in 1977, Cox landed a dream clerkship with U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Herbert Choy in Hawaii.

A year later, Cox joined the prestigious Latham & Watkins law firm and went to work in its Newport Beach office. He made partner in 1984.

In the early 1980s, Cox became active in Republican politics. Among other activities, he drafted a memorandum outlining a strategy to defeat liberal California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird, who was required to run in a re-confirmation election.

The work paid off. In 1986, Cox was offered a job in the White House counsel’s office, an opportunity that he quickly accepted.

When Cox returned to Orange County two years later, it was as a candidate for the open seat in the old 40th Congressional District, which was being vacated by seven-term incumbent, Robert E. Badham.

Cox was virtually assured election as Badham’s successor when he narrowly won the June 7 GOP primary. The following November, Cox won the general election with 67% of the vote. He has maintained close to that margin in each succeeding contest.

Cox married last year, in late August, when he was 39. His wife is the former Rebecca Gernhardt Range, an executive with Continental Airlines. Cox and Range met when they both worked at the White House, but did not begin seeing each other socially until several years later. The couple own a home in Newport Beach, and rent a townhouse in Washington, near Rock Creek Park.

Their son, born in April, has had a profound effect on the congressman, his friends say.

“When you’re a Harvard-trained lawyer, I guess they teach you to be a lawyer and not a human being,” says Rohrabacher. “When you see Chris Cox with his baby, you know he’s a real human being.”

Despite his secure hold on his congressional seat, friends say Cox is chafing at his party’s minority status in the House of Representatives, and eager to make a bid for the Senate, which Cox believes Republicans could capture in 1994.

But before he can challenge the incumbent U.S. senator, Cox would have to face a tough primary, one that would pit him against Huffington, who has the personal wealth to far outspend Cox. In his congressional race last year, Huffington spent $5.4 million, of which $5.2 million was his own. He set a national record for the most expensive House race in history.

To win, Cox would have to build a war chest 10 times larger than any he has put together for his congressional campaigns--enough money to buy the television time needed to make his name familiar to the tens of thousands of California voters who have never heard of Christopher Cox of Orange County.

Some believe the goal may be impossible. But those who know Cox say that, intelligence aside, drive and ambition may be his defining qualities.

Says one Orange County businessman: “I think Chris Cox is a guy who gets up every morning, looks in the mirror, and sees a President of the United States.”

Times political writer Dave Lesher and Times staff writer Gebe Martinez contributed to this report.