Look, I know that Chris Cox hasn't shown much interest in the
vice presidency. But the McCain team ought to try to convince him
to run. Four considerations now should make Cox's star
ascendant.
First and most importantly, there is the renewed focus on the
threat from Russia. The Georgia disaster has gotten through the
clutter and impressed the American public mind as something very
important. And it makes it all the more important, therefore, to
have an administration that understands Russia. Chris Cox, better
than anybody out there, can make that claim. He actually knows the
Russian language, fluently. So fluently in fact that he once ran a
business translating Pravda into English, during the height of the
Cold War, so that State Department types could see what the Soviets
really were saying (and thus better be able to counter whatever the
Soviets were up to).
Second, there is the big Olympic spotlight on China right now,
and on how potentially dangerous China can be, along with what
opportunities they offer as well. While Fred Thompson's special
committee looking into Chinese influence-peddling was fizzling a
bit in the 1990s, Cox led a similar House committee, focused mostly
on Chinese espionage, and it was a tremendous success. It unearthed
a bunch of highly useful data, and it issued a unanimous,
bipartisan report -- a near miracle during a time of strong
partisan antipathy on Capitol Hill. The report was almost
universally praised at the time. And in recent months I have been
at a private lunch where, apropos of nothing, the host (an
impressive man) began reminiscing about the days when Cox was
leading House Policy Committee discussions on the Hill,
specifically on China, and about how thoughtful and insightful Cox
was.
Third, there is the uptick in the past month in the stock
market, and in the value of the dollar. It is true that Cox has
been widely pilloried for his move at the SEC to crack down on
naked short selling, but the simple fact is that the market began
recovering ON THE VERY DAY that Cox announced his plan, indeed
almost to the minute. The McCain camp can make a serious argument
that the Cox move on short-selling was exactly the thing that
stopped the economic panic and started the recovery. Along the same
lines, I and others who know him far better than I do can all
attest that Cox's knowledge of economics, commitment to
conservative economic principles, and ability to talk about (and
explain in comprehensible terms) those principles, are all
absolutely first-rate. Again, this ability of his would greatly
help alleviate one of McCain's weaknesses.
Fourth, while this isn't a major public issue, it also should be
of way more help than hindrance: This is THE year, of all years,
that the class-action plaintiffs' bar is most in disprepute, what
with folks like Bill Lerach, Mel Weiss, and Dickie Scruggs all
going to prison. Well, the fact is that the guy most responsible
for putting Lerach and Weiss in jail is Chris Cox. IT was Cox who
wrote the law, almost singlehandedly, that explicitly made it
illegal for lawyers to do the exat sorts of underhanded things that
Lerach and Weiss were doing. Cox even mentioned Lerach by name, at
the time, as a target of the law. After Lerach visited Clinton at
the White House, Clinton vetoed Cox's law -- and then Congress
overrode the veto and implemented the law anyway, the ONLY time in
eight years that Congress overrode a Clinton veto. Then Lerach and
Weiss broke the new law, and now they have been caught and
imprisoned.
There: Those are four good reasons. Add to it the pro-life
record of Cox, even going so far as to write a pro-life column on
the Supreme Court for the Wall Street Journal when Cox was a junior
congressman, at a time when McCain needs to continue working to
reassure the Christian right of his pro-life commitment, and you
see why Cox would add a lot to the ticket.
Even if Cox hasn't shown much interest in the job, there is
still time for McCain's forces to vet him fully (the job is easier
because Cox already was fully vetted by the FBI just three years
back when he was up for the SEC Chairmanship, a job for which he
was unanimously approved by the Senate) and to prepare a great,
moving, convincing narrative around a McCain-Cox ticket.
topics:
Economics, Business, Law, Supreme Court, Russia
