Outsider John Cox assails waste, big government

By Carol Hunter
Editorial Page Editor
April 4, 2007

Republican presidential candidate John Cox looked every part the businessman that he is when he discussed supply-side economics with the Register's editorial board on Monday.

He wore a dark suit, with faint pinstripes; standard light-blue shirt; red tie, with blue-and-white stripes; plus the requisite candidate adornment of a U.S. flag pin on his lapel.

His neatly coiffed white hair is reminiscent of one of his early supply-side mentors, former New York Rep. Jack Kemp. Cox was on Kemp's Illinois steering committee for his presidential run in 1988, and Cox proudly calls himself a Reagan-Kemp conservative.

Cox, a lawyer and certified public accountant, has never held elective office, but he counts that as an advantage: "Our founding fathers were business people," he said. "They weren't career politicians."

Reinforcing his points with hand sweeps and look-you-in-the eyes intensity, he outlined philosophies of social and fiscal conservatism that have been shaped literally from birth.

He described himself as a product of rape, when his father forced himself on his mother before they married. "They were only married a month or two. She got a name for me," he said. "That's what you did in 1955. I'm not saying it's a perfect system."

"But you know what?" he asked, his eyebrows raised. "I had a right to live."

A Catholic, he opposes abortion in all circumstances, including rape. "Killing the baby doesn't make the rape go away. If you're raped, give the child up."

Abortions are a consequence of failing to take responsibility for children, he said. "I really believe ... a lot of abortions are by women who say it's just inconvenient for them. They're in school. It's a guy they don't like."

His meager upbringing influenced his fiscal outlook, too.

"I grew up with nothing," he said. "I had to scrape for everything I had. I hate waste. I think the average person out there who works so hard every single day is horrified at the waste that goes on in government."

His horror at wasteful, ineffective government drives his candidacy.

"I supported George Bush in 2000," he said. "I gave a lot of money to a lot of senators that went to Washington. They told me they were going to do something about the spending. They told me they were going to do something about our ridiculous tax system. They told me in later years ... that we have an immigration crisis. They said they were going to do something about that."

He raised his voice slightly as he repeated each pledge, then dropped it to a whisper: "They haven't done it."

Indeed, he said, "My Republican Party left me in the past five or six years."

Low-tax-rate, supply-side theory and a belief in smaller government infuse his approaches to most issues.

Cox endorses the so-called FAIR tax, a national sales tax of 23 percent. It would do away with payroll and inheritance taxes, eliminate the Internal Revenue Service, encourage savings and level the world playing field for U.S. manufacturing, he said.

He would tackle rising health-care costs by attacking the supply side: "What we ought to be doing as a country is fostering more supply of doctors, more supply of nurses, more supply of insurance companies, more competitive products..."

Free-market themes are familiar to the Republican faithful, but Cox's name barely registers in polls, if he's even included as a choice.

Cox has invested time in Iowa, though, visiting all 99 counties between March and June last year. He noted that he ranked in the top half of GOP candidates in an informal survey of county chairmen by Iowapolitics.com.

But his fundraising amounts to thousands of dollars, not millions. He keeps going with his own money and gets free publicity nationally through interviews on conservative radio shows. He's been interviewed by Des Moines' Jan Mickelson five times and gave seven radio interviews on Friday, he said. He rolled right from the editorial board into a phone interview with an Oklahoma station.

He vowed to stay in the race at least through January. "I will get these issues heard."