Bloomberg News profiles former California Congressman Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) who is now Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Chris’ campaign was one of my first, helping him by walking (a lot) of precincts back in 1998. Here’s the article:
SEC’s Cox confounds predictions
Conservative ex-St. Paulite shifts from lawmaker to law enforcer
BY BOB DRUMMOND
Bloomberg News
During more than 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, California Republican Christopher Cox was the quintessential conservative.
After a stint as a lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s White House, Cox was elected nine times from the Republican stronghold of Orange County, where no Democrat has won the presidential vote since Franklin Roosevelt. After Republicans took control of the House under Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1994 elections, they chose Cox to lead the party’s legislative policy-setting committee.
When President Bush picked Cox, 54, in June 2005 to replace William Donaldson as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the move set off alarms among investor advocates. Amid a mutual fund trading scandal and fallout from multibillion-dollar accounting frauds at companies including Enron Corp., Donaldson had broken ranks with two other Republicans and cast deciding votes on the five-member SEC for stricter regulation of mutual and hedge funds and record-setting penalties for fraud.
Cox, in contrast, was best known to Wall Street and investors for sponsoring a 1995 law that limits shareholder lawsuits blaming stock losses on management malfeasance. Business groups, eyeing Cox’s pedigree, rooted for him to join the SEC’s incumbent Republicans.
"He’d been a Republican Party operative, and the number one concern was that he was going to be soft on business," says Samuel Jones, vice president at Boston-based Trillium Asset Management Corp., which manages $1 billion in socially responsible mutual funds.
Résumés, it turns out, can be deceiving. Cox, a securities lawyer who holds MBA and law degrees from Harvard University and grew up in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood, says he never contemplated overturning existing regulations or going easy on corporate crooks.
"It was maddening," says Cox, who was under instructions to make no public statements before his Senate confirmation hearing. "I might have set a lot of the speculation to rest if only I could have said something."
The rest of the story is here.