00:00:00BOB SHORT: Thank you very much. Thank you for being here. I'd like to
introduce to you now two members of the staff of the Russell Library at the
University of Georgia--Ms. Naomi Carver--Craver, who is the Director of Audio
Visuals, and Craig Breaden, who is the Director of Media and Oral History at the
library at the University of Georgia. And we are delighted to have him here with
us today, and we're delighted to have you here. Please help me welcome a former
state Representative, Georgia Secretary of State, a candidate for Governor, and
President of Young Harris College, Ms. Cathy Cox.
[Applause]
00:01:00
SHORT: Cathy, thank you for being here today on this program. You've had a very
interesting career, which began down in Bainbridge, Georgia, which is deep south
Georgia on the Florida line, all the way to Young Harris, which is in deep
northeast Georgia and about as far as you can go and stay in the state.
CATHY COX: My mother keeps pointing that out.
(laughter)
SHORT: It's quite a trip, quite a trip. Before we get into your political and
public service career, I would like to ask you to tell us a little bit about
yourself and growing up down in Bainbridge.
COX: Well, you're right, my mother keeps pointing out that I have found the
furthest point in the state of Georgia from Bainbridge to move to and it's a
long drive by car, but I'm really, really excited about being here at Young
Harris and taking on all the challenges at the college. I certainly never even
remotely thought as a child in Bainbridge, Georgia about being a college
00:02:00President. Nor did I think about being a Secretary of State! So, my life has
led in a lot of different ways. But I grew up as the oldest of four daughters in
my family with my mother, Mary Cox, who's still living in Bainbridge, and my
father, Walter Cox, who was a lifelong funeral director. His father was a
funeral director who moved to Georgia in the 1920s from Virginia and scooped up
my grandmother in Smyrna and hauled her down to rural Georgia to open up Cox
Funeral Home in 1927. And the way the funeral business kind of worked--operating
through families over the years--my father and his brother bought out their dad
in the funeral business, and when my sister and I came along, we lived in the
funeral home. So, we grew up as children in downtown Bainbridge living upstairs
over Cox Funeral Home and playing in the front yard and playing in the town
00:03:00square as our only front yard. When we finally had a third daughter, they
decided we were a little too noisy for a funeral home and we actually got a
house and moved out of the funeral home, but had a very typical, idyllic in many
ways, childhood in small town, rural Georgia.
SHORT: And you were interested in agriculture at one point.
COX: Well, I did. I started out in college as a major in agriculture at Abraham
Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, actually in horticulture--was kind of my
specific area. And I landed there, because when I finished high school in
Bainbridge I honestly didn't know what I wanted to major in. I liked to do so
many different things. My mother is an artist and I had grown up taking art
lessons and thought about majoring in art, but she suggested I should major in
something I could make a living at. And my dad only cautioned my sisters and me
00:04:00to major in something we could make a living at, as well. So, I ended up in
horticulture because both of my grandmothers were great gardeners. One
grandmother was big into camellias. Another grandmother had a great garden with
strawberries and vegetables and a chicken house with eggs, and I really grew up
around both of my grandparents working in a garden, and in high school had
summer jobs working at a plant nursery and thought that that might be a career
path of interest to me to work with plants, maybe to go into research, maybe to
own a nursery. But I really found that to be an interesting challenge. So, I
ended up in horticulture until I interned during one of my college summers at
Calloway Gardens in their horticultural intern program. That's where I learned
00:05:00to run a chainsaw, you know, great, useful skills down the road. And one day
pulling weeds in 105 degree weather next to PhDs in botany, I decided that
having a job in the air conditioning wouldn't be an altogether bad thing. So,
when I transferred to the University of Georgia, I changed my major and again
went through this struggle of what do I want to major in. I'm interested in lots
of things, but I don't know what I want to do, and I had had a summer job by
then at the newspaper in Bainbridge just because my family was very close to Sam
Griffin, who was the publisher of the Bainbridge Post Searchlight and he let me
come in as a very green college student to work in the summer. So, I ended up
changing my major to journalism. Also thanks, I guess, to one of my professors
at ABAC who was the journalism professor and headed up all the of the student
publications, and I had edited the yearbook and worked on the newspaper there,
but honestly had never thought about newspapers as a career. So I got into the
00:06:00journalism school at Georgia and loved it, and graduated with a degree in
journalism and went to work for the newspaper in Gainesville, Georgia right out
of school at UGA.
SHORT: Well, I'm an old sports writer so I have covered sports. What sort of
reporting did you have to do at Gainesville?
COX: Well, I found that unless you're in a specialized area like sports, the
new kid on the block at most newspapers gets the police beat. And that's what I
got was a scanner and the police beat. And som I lived for a couple of years in
Hall County, chasing fire trucks and ambulances, and riding with the police and
sheriff's departments, and going to autopsies, and rappelling into copper mines
to look for dead bodies. And I was fascinated by it. And I guess maybe mentally
growing up in a funeral home kind of mentally prepared me for what I saw, not
that I really had ever even seen a person embalmed when we lived in the funeral
00:07:00home, but I mentally could handle some really gruesome scenes that I saw as a
police reporter. But I was fascinated by it and really enjoyed it. But as a
police reporter, I had to cover everything from a crime scene to the trial of a
defendant, and once I got into the courtroom I had no idea what was going on. I
didn’t know what the lawyers were talking about. I didn't know what the judge
was saying and I was supposed to go back to the newspaper and write a story and
explain this to the public. So, I decided that I wanted to go to law school just
to get the education and then go back to a newspaper and write about legal
issues because there were no lawyers in my family. I had never been inside a
lawyer's office. Frankly, when I graduated at UGA, some of my friends who were
going on to law school suggested that I go and I said, "Lawyers are so obnoxious."
(laughter)
COX: "Who wants to be lawyer?” And three years later, I was there.
00:08:00
SHORT: You married one.
(laughter)
COX: I married one. I became one, and once I got into law school and was
putting myself through school at Mercer University Law School, I started working
at law firms and found out that it was very different than I had really
envisioned. And I found--especially in litigation--that it was 75% writing, and
as much as I liked to write and had a lot of experience in writing under
pressure for a newspaper, I found that to be a really nice element of private
practice. So, I did a complete turn and ended up going into private practice in
Atlanta when I graduated from Mercer.
SHORT: Before we get away from Bainbridge, let me ask you about Governor Marvin
Griffin. Did you know Governor Griffin?
COX: I did. When I was in journalism school and I would go back to work at the
newspaper, the Post Searchlight during all my summers and Christmas holidays,
Governor Griffin was still living. And so he came into the paper every week with
00:09:00his columns and would come through the newsroom. And, if you knew him, he
couldn't take five steps without telling a story. He was the really great, great
stump speaker for all of Georgia's political history and he just exuded stories.
He could not walk around without telling stories. So we all knew him. Everybody
in the community knew him because he was so personable and so well loved by
everyone. Even his political enemies, I think, would tell you that they still
liked him because he was such a likable guy. So, I had the chance to know him
while I was a little cub reporter, but after my two years in Gainesville, I
decided--when I decided to go back to law school I needed to go save some money.
So I moved back to Bainbridge for a year and Governor Griffin had just died, so
his son, Sam, hired me back for that one year really not so much to be a
reporter for the paper, but to spend the year researching Governor Griffin's
00:10:00political history with the idea that we might write a book one day, he and I.
So, I spent that year reading all of Governor Griffin's speeches and columns and
writings, and traveled around the state interviewing his political colleagues
and his enemies. I interviewed Roy Harris and Governor Carl Sanders who defeated
him in 1962, and so many other people who worked in his administration and
worked on his campaigns to collect all of that information about a really
colorful area in Georgia politics. We never got the book written, so maybe
that’s one of those projects we'll take on one day.
SHORT: Well, that would be good. I don't think his biography has ever been written.
COX: Not fully, that's for sure.
SHORT: Okay, so you practiced law in Atlanta.
COX: Started out with Hansel and Post. I had--as much as I had never
contemplated being a lawyer, I certainly had never thought about living in
Atlanta. Being from a small town in south Georgia, you sort of grow up with this
00:11:00Atlanta phobia and it's a nice place to visit, but you don't want to stay there
very long. But when I had an offer from Hansel and Post, one of the largest
firms in Atlanta, to come and work for the summer after my second year in law
school, I thought, you know, it's just the summer, might as well try it out.
They pay you well. It's a lot of fun and I really loved it. It changed my
perspective on Atlanta. At that time, Hansel and Post was located right in
downtown Atlanta at the heart of five points and it was a very different day in
downtown Atlanta. Woodruff Park was beautiful. It was safe and friendly to walk
around downtown during lunch and that summer really changed my perspective on
what I wanted to do, and the firm offered me a permanent job upon my graduation.
So, I went back to practice as a corporate trial lawyer in 1986 when I finished
00:12:00at Mercer.
SHORT: So, after you went back to Bainbridge following your law career in
Atlanta. And did you open your private practice--a private practice?
COX: Well, I stayed in Atlanta for two years at Hansel and Post and had a great
experience there, but then my dad was diagnosed with cancer--with colon cancer.
And it was just one of those things that hit me as the right things to do and I
wanted to be at home, and I had found out pretty quickly that in large
commercial Atlanta firms there's not a lot of opportunity for you to be involved
in the community. And that was so much of the way my family had grown up and how
I had been raised--not just to be involved in politics, but to be involved in
your church and in volunteer groups and in civic organizations. And it was so
much a part of who I was that I could tell staying in that culture at that
Atlanta firm for the long haul was not going to be satisfying to me. So I was, I
guess, in a mode of looking for a change when my dad became ill and I said,
00:13:00"Well I just want to be at home.” So I said, "Well, I'm going to come home and
practice.” But at the time there had never been a woman lawyer in Bainbridge
lawyer. This was late 1988. So, I called the firm where I had worked in the
summers and asked if they would take me in as an associate, and the two younger
partners, who were more my contemporaries were all for it. The senior partner,
who was my dad's age, was not sure he nor Bainbridge was ready for a lady
lawyer. But he thought about it and said, "Yeah, come on home.” And so I
joined the firm of Lambert, Floyd and Conger in 1988 and became a partner the
next year. And became the first lady lawyer in 11 counties in Southwest Georgia.
SHORT: That was Willis Conger's firm?
COX: It was Willis Conger's nephew--was one of the partners.
SHORT: Well, I knew your father. He was in the state legislature.
COX: He didn't like lawyers very much.
SHORT: He didn't. He was a very good legislator.
00:14:00
COX: Thank you.
SHORT: And I'm sure that his influence on you sort of guided you to succeed him.
COX: It--I think all my sisters would tell you the same story. We grew up
living and breathing politics. My dad first ran for political office when we
were in elementary school and he ran for the city council and then he ran for
Mayor while I was still in elementary school, and then moved on to the state
legislature in 1974. But as children, as small children, my mother would paint
t-shirts that said, "Vote for my daddy.” Put them on the four of us, put us
out on the street and say, "Go to every house, knock on the door, hand them a
card, tell them to vote for your daddy and I'll pick you up at the corner.”
And that's how we learned campaigning before we were--before I was ever ten
years old. I knew what it was to go around and ask people to vote for my dad,
and to get excited on election night and wait for the votes to come in. So, I
grew up seeing campaigns from a very interesting and exciting standpoint. But
00:15:00into my teen years I got so fascinated with legislative politics. I read the
paper every morning with my dad at breakfast. And you'd read all the stories in
the Atlanta paper about the legislature, and then he'd tell me what was really
happening. And he'd say, "Well now here's--they said in this in the paper, but
here's what they're really after. And here's what the Speaker's likely to do,
and here's what they want to trade out, and here's who's going to help them.”
And I learned so much, every morning I had a lesson in legislative politics
talking to him about what happened to be in the news. And I loved the give and
take of the legislature and the people and the personalities, and the fact that
they came from all different walks of life and out of that chaos generally came
some pretty good laws. So when I got to the University of Georgia I quickly
found out about a legislative internship program and applied for it, and took
00:16:00off a quarter during my senior year to be a legislative intern. And that in
itself was a great experience to be right there in the middle of it after a
number of years of following it, but the first day I arrived at the Capitol as a
legislative intern. They said, "Well, her dad's in the House. We're going to
assign her to a committee in the Senate.” And I went to my first assignment in
the Senate, and the next thing I knew I got called to the office, kind of like
being called to the principal. And some Senator had complained that I might be a
spy for the House. And so they jerked me out of a Senate committee, and at the
time this was the 1980 session. They were doing a lot of tax reform and they had
a joint House-Senate tax reform commission, so they made me the aid to the tax
reform commission because it served both the House and the Senate. So I really
got to be up close and personal and go to a lot of dinners with my dad, and talk
to him, and walk in on the floor and listen to the debates, and absolutely fell
00:17:00in love with the legislature.
SHORT: You aren't insinuating that the House and Senate don't get along, are you?
COX: They didn't get along then. They certainly don't get along now. The House
is always superior.
(laughter)
SHORT: So you come to Atlanta as a state Representative, and you meet Tom
Murphy. I'm sure he gave you good committees.
COX: He did. I knew him already, of course. During my dad's service I had
gotten to meet him and know him, and after my dad died it had been a couple of
years after he passed away before I ran. A family friend won the office right
after my dad's death, and in 1992 after reapportionment that split the county
up, I had the chance to run and run in some counties west of Bainbridge. And my
family friend, Kermit Bates, who had won the seat when dad died kept the south
00:18:00part of the county and some counties east. So, I arrived and Speaker Murphy was
very good to me. He gave me all the committees that I asked for, but for the
first little while I was very much Walter's daughter, you know, pat me on the
head, isn't she cute, she's Walter's daughter. And I had to prove myself that I
was there as an equally elected member of the House of Representatives and I
worked hard to establish that reputation. And--but I had a great advantage of
going in as Walter's daughter because I knew 90% of the members. I knew the
process. I knew what I had a chance to get accomplished, and it was a great
advantage having that background.
SHORT: Well, you quickly gained the reputation as a working legislator. But
please tell us about some of your interests at that time and what you hoped to
accomplish as a member of that all male society.
00:19:00
COX: It was very male dominated, that was for sure. But I guess also, because I
was Walter Cox's daughter, most of the men, even the very senior members treated
me very cordially and opened doors for me, and helped me avoid missteps. But a
lot of what I did was based on my law practice, and I think most of the folks I
served with in the House would tell you that I talked a lot more than my dad
ever did.
(laughter) COX: He sat on the back row as part of the Saw Mill Gang and didn't
nearly go to the well as much as I did, but maybe that was because I was a
lawyer and I knew the process so well. He was not a lawyer. He was a funeral
director. It took him a while to get the hang of writing and revising the
Georgia code and I could jump right into it knowing the process as well as the
law. But I took advantage of my law practice, especially in Bainbridge where I
00:20:00did a very personal practice, and being the only female attorney in that whole
region, I did a lot of domestic relations work, a lot of divorce, a lot of child
custody work, child support laws, and I used my experiences to work on places I
saw flaws in the law. For example, with our child support system, I was a major
proponent of an overhaul to the child support laws during my service there,
because I saw it needed some flexibility. Judges needed some authority to vary
from a very strict formula in awarding child support, whether a non-custodial
parent had other children, whether they were paying health insurance, all these
kind of factors that needed to be considered by a judge, and I was able to add
those to the law for judges to consider. I'm not a real big proponent of the
00:21:00laws that have changed since then, excuse me, for child support, but I could use
a lot of my experiences and go to a committee meeting and say, "Look, this is
how this law is effecting real people. Let's change this to make it fairer and
more equitable.” And you find out that just because it's in the law doesn't
mean it's carved in stone. If you've got a better idea and you know how to
advocate through the legislative system, you can easily change Georgia laws. And
I found it to be a wonderfully interesting and exciting process that I could
really work for the benefit of everyday people.
SHORT: Then you had an opportunity to become assistant Secretary of State. How
did that come around?
COX: Well, a lot of people didn't understand that. I had been in the House. I
had been--I was in my second term in the legislature and I was pretty much
killing myself trying to maintain a full time law practice in the early nineties
00:22:00and be in Atlanta as often as you had to be as a member of the legislature. And
also coming from a rural area, members of the legislature have a lot of
constituent service work to do, much more so than urban legislators, because
people in Atlanta hardly even know who their Representative or Senator is. But
in a small town, they know you in the grocery store, they know you in Sunday
School, they know you on the street. And there are a lot of needs in rural
Georgia, particularly in my corner of Southwest Georgia with a lot of poverty.
So, trying to practice law as a--in a small firm is difficult when you've got to
spend three full months of the year in Atlanta, and this was pre-internet. I
mean the internet was just coming along, so I wasn't like if I had an afternoon
off I could go click onto my laptop and work on some cases at home. You were
stuck. So every Friday afternoon I was beating a path 250 miles down the road to
00:23:00Bainbridge trying to practice law from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, driving
back to Atlanta. And I finally had come to a point of saying, "I've either got
to get out of this and devote myself completely to my practice or do public
service full-time.” And it was about that time that Max Cleland had resigned
from the U.S. Senate. Governor Miller had appointed Lewis Massey as Secretary of
State, and a mutual friend suggested to Lewis that I might be interested in
serving as his Chief of Staff--his assistant Secretary of State. Som Lewis and I
had known each other. We weren't best buddies or anything, but he had been
working in the Senate for Pierre Howard while I was in the legislature. So I
knew him and had worked with him, and he called and it was very much one of
those things that just hit me at the right time at the right place. So I had to
resign my seat in the House, move back to Atlanta and work full time in the
00:24:00Secretary of State's office--not knowing where it would lead, but knowing that
it just seemed like the right challenge at the right chance, at the right time.
And a year later in 1997, you will remember that the front runners for Governor
in 1997, leading up to the '98 Governor's race were Mike Bowers and Pierre
Howard, neither of whom ever became Governor because all the landscape changed
in '97 when Pierre Howard dropped out of the race; some scandals arose with Mike
Bowers and Lewis Massey, as Secretary of State, decided he was going to jump
into the Governor's race. So everybody kind of looked around the room and said,
"Well, who's going to run for Secretary of State, and I threw up my hand, very
naively, very young, I guess, and naïve. I didn't have a statewide reputation.
I certainly didn't have independent wealth, but I knew I could do that job. So,
00:25:00I jumped into the race in '97 and won it in '98.
SHORT: All right, and then--and then you became the custodian of state records
and election laws, and what were some of the duties that you had as Secretary of State?
COX: Well, the Georgia Secretary of State's office probably has more areas of
jurisdiction than almost any other Secretary of State's office in the country.
We do professional licensing, for example, for dentists and physical therapists,
and plumbers, and hairdressers, and all kinds of other occupations and
professions. That's very uncommon in other states. We--I served as the
Commissioner of Securities to regulate the investment industry for securities in
Georgia. We handle corporations, of course, and all the business aspects for the
state. We handled elections, which is the area that most people knew about, but
00:26:00also the State Archives and even boxing. I was the professional boxing
commissioner for Georgia, which nobody knew about, but the first year I spent in
the office every time I'd answer the phone I'd listen to somebody and then I'd
say, "Hold on, please.” And then I'd have to ask somebody, "Do we do this?”
SHORT: (laughter)
COX: Because we just had such a broad area of jurisdiction, but that made the
job really interesting.
SHORT: Well, let's talk for a minute about elections. You were instrumental in
the new system we have--electronic voting. Is that an accomplishment you set out
to do?
COX: It really has and it came about, of course, as a result of the 2000
Presidential election where everybody in the world focused on the State of
Florida. But while all of that media attention was going on in Florida during
the recounts between Bush and Gore, I took the opportunity to do an evaluation
of what had happened in Georgia. And what we found just absolutely stunned us,
00:27:00because we found that we had lost almost 94,000 votes for President in Georgia.
That was about 3.5% of our total vote, which was a worse--a worse accuracy rate
than Florida. In fact, Caltech and MIT ultimately said it was the second worst
voting accuracy rate in the nation. But the reason it got no attention was
because the election was not close in Georgia. So even though we had a 94,000
vote loss, the margin between Bush and Gore was not that close in Georgia. So it
wouldn't have changed the outcome of our electoral college vote, so the media
didn't care. But to us, it was just staggering to think that that many people
had lost the opportunity to have their vote count. So we dug further and found
out that it really was an equipment problem. We had counties voting on all kinds
of outdated, inefficient, and really just obsolete voting equipment.
00:28:00Over--almost over half of our counties were still voting on the old, 800-pound
lever machines that had not even been manufactured in 40 years. You couldn't
even buy parts for those things, but we still had counties voting on them. And
during the first couple of years I was in office it was not uncommon to have a
county call up on election night in a panic, because they had unlocked the back
of one of those lever machines. They're totally metal, mechanical, and they just
turn when the lever is punched to rotate a little odometer on the back of the
machine. And they'd open it up after seven o'clock and find a zero because
something had just gotten out of whack and no votes had been counted all day
long, but nobody knew it. No way to reconstruct a ballot or anything like that,
no way to audit it and that's what half the votes in the state were being
counted on. We were very surprised to find that the optical scan ballot, like a
00:29:00standardized test where you fill in a bubble by a vote--a candidate's name, or
you connect an arrow beside the candidate's name, that type of voting system had
the highest error rate over even the punch cards that we had in Fulton County
and DeKalb County, and that were the focus in Florida. The optical scan had
worse error rates, because we found out with one whole county they gave their
voters the wrong kind of pencil and at the end of the day it wouldn't count any
votes because the scanner would not read the lead from the pencil. Now, in that
case we had a way, a legal way to replicate and reproduce the ballots and get
them counted, but it told you some voter could have gone in with their fancy
Monte Blanc pen and cast their ballot, and never known that it didn't count. We
also would have people who put an X over the little bubble and the scanner
wouldn't read the X. If you looked at the ballot, you'd know who they intended
to vote for, but the scanner wouldn’t count it. So we looked at all of this
00:30:00and said, "There has to be a better way. We have to give Georgia voters an
assurance that their vote will be counted.” So we did a lot of investigating
about the types of voting equipment that were available in the marketplace. We
put together a 21st-century voting commission with the authority of the
legislature and legislative input into it and spent a year studying what was
available, and came to the unanimous conclusion that electronic voting was by
far a better system of voting, that could be set up in a way to ensure the
accuracy of the vote and the vote totals and much easier for voters to use
without making mistakes. Everything gave us a good feeling about moving into the
electronic age. So, we put that in place--the first state in the nation to do
that in the 2002 election season and it worked wonderfully. It has worked
00:31:00wonderfully ever since and when the 2004 Presidential election came on, Caltech
and MIT came back and did the same evaluation that they did in 2000 and said
Georgia went from the second worst voting accuracy rate to the second best, just
a hair behind the state of Maryland, which had purchased the same type of voting
equipment that we purchased. So we were very pleased and really believe we
accomplished what we set out to do in giving voters a great level of confidence
that their vote would be counted and counted accurately.
SHORT: There have been suggestions in recent times that that system needs
backing up with some sort of paper ballot. Is that necessary, really?
COX: I have been chased all over the state of Georgia by folks who think that I
rig the elections and that all the elections are rigged, and that I'm part of a
great conspiracy theory and they have literally stalked me around the state of
00:32:00Georgia for the last couple of years that I was in office. And they finally came
to the point of saying, "The only way we'll know elections are not rigged is if
Cathy Cox loses the primary in 2006.”
SHORT: (laughter)
COX: And, of course, when I lost, they had to come up with another story, which
they did. But that's kind of they way they play. But it's an odd kind of
situation, because in the electronic voting we use now, the computer is not seen
by the voter. And so they're suspicious of it, but they have--the
voters--average voters have no idea of the exhaustive testing that goes into
preparing for an election. Every single voting unit--there are over 25,000 of
them now in the state of Georgia--each machine is individually tested before
every single election, a whole battery of tests. Those tests are open to the
public to come and watch and then the machines are sealed up until election day
00:33:00with a numerical seal that has to be checked on the morning of elections to make
sure nobody could get access to that machine--it couldn't be tampered with. The
state elections board has set up rules and regulations for how the machines are
stored. I can spend an hour talking to you about all the levels of security that
go into the machines that give me the comfort level that these machines are
great and are very accurate in counting the machines. But because the computer
is not seen by voters, a lot of people are suspicious about it. Now, those same
people forget that the punch cards that were first used in Georgia in the early
sixties, they were counted by a computer that was virtually untested. The
optical scan voters are counted by a computer that until recent years had very
little testing or security. So computers in elections are nothing new. In fact,
00:34:00the new part is the fact that we now have level after level of testing and
security before election day. So I feel very good about the machines as they are
today, but I certainly came to understand and to somewhat change my opinion that
if--in elections perception is reality. And if the voting public needs a paper
receipt to feel more confident in the process, then we ought to give it to them
so that there isn't doubt and suspicion about the outcome of elections. So
sooner or later I suspect that it will be added. The new Secretary of State,
Karen Handel, has found out exactly what I knew when I left office--that the
whole industry of voting equipment is in flux, new technology is under
development, it's all very expensive. And I think she has decided she needs to
wait and let some things settle down in the marketplace before the state makes
00:35:00another investment to do that.
SHORT: What are your feelings on voter ID?
COX: Oh, don't get me started. In fact, you know, just yesterday the U.S.
Supreme Court heard the Indiana Voter ID Law and I actually signed onto an
amicus brief for that case with other current and former Secretaries of State to
oppose the Indiana law. Because I feel very, very strongly that the voter ID law
as it has been written in Georgia is a bad form of public policy. I'm not
opposed to voter ID. In fact, in 1997 before I was elected Secretary of
State--when Lewis Massey was Secretary--I wrote the law that the General
Assembly passed in '97 to add an identification requirement for voting. But it
gave voters the chance to use a number of different types of ID, and if they had
none of those they could still sign an affidavit at the poles about their
00:36:00identity and not be turned away. That system worked very well for the following
eight to nine years when the legislature got into this photo ID mode, which I
fully believe is a process to try to disenfranchise Democratic leaning voters,
elderly, minority voters who do tend to vote more as Democrats. And I guess,
maybe I'm just a little too much of a lawyer and I want to get into a
constitutional battle with people that voting being a constitutional right is
something you cannot infringe upon without a darn good reason. And I was able to
testify in federal court during the challenges to Georgia's law that we did not
have one incident of voter impersonation during the 11 years that I was in the
00:37:00Secretary of State's office that would justify infringing on this constitutional
right to vote. And on the flip side, I could see it causing a lot of problems to
some of our most vulnerable voters, especially elderly voters, many of whom
don't drive anymore and don't have a driver's license. And they're the most
regular, consistent voters. So how are you going to say to an 85-year-old voter
who's never missed an election, "Too bad.” You know, or, "You've got to go
through X, Y, Z hoops to vote now because we somehow don't trust that you are
who you say you are.” I think it's bad public policy and I'd love to see the
U.S. Supreme Court strike it down, but I doubt that this Court will do that.
SHORT: Then you ran for Governor. I bet that was fun.
COX: There was a lot of it that was fun and a lot that was not.
00:38:00
SHORT: (laughter)
COX: Over the years, I guess, of being around state government, and in my life
going back even to my childhood and the discussions with my dad and serving in a
constitutional office, you see that the real agenda for Georgia is set in the
Governor's office, or in my opinion should be set in the Governor's office. And
after the 2002 elections, I really started thinking about running for Governor,
because I was not happy with what was happening from the Governor's office. And
I felt like the state deserved a different kind of leader and a leader who was
willing to tackle a lot of the problems we had, that it wasn't a chair you got
to just warm for four years, that a Governor ought to be proactive and provide
real leadership. And so, that's why I decided in 2004 or so that I would jump
into the race for 2006, and did so.
00:39:00
SHORT: Good. You would have been the first female Governor Georgia had ever had.
COX: That's true.
SHORT: Did you think about that?
COX: Yeah, I thought about it and, you know, I thought about it as the first
female Secretary of State, but I also saw between my first election as Secretary
in 1998 when numerous people were not shy about saying to me, "Oh, I don't know
if a woman can do that job as Secretary of State.” They'd never seen it so
they really couldn't envision a woman being Secretary of State. When I ran in
2002 for reelection, it's no big deal.
SHORT: Sixty-one percent of the vote.
COX: Yeah.
SHORT: That's a pretty good margin.
COX: It was--it was strong and I was very pleasantly surprised in my run for
Governor that that was rarely an issue. The times that I heard people talk about
doubting whether a woman could serve as Governor, I could trace it back almost
00:40:00immediately to my opponents who wanted the state to believe Georgia wasn't ready
for a woman or that a woman wasn't capable of serving. But by and large, it was
not a big issue. I felt like it was an advantage and that Georgians were ready
for a change in the meanness and the partisanship, and felt like--that perhaps a
woman would have a chance to break through some of those barriers to actually
get something done.
SHORT: Let's take a short break.
COX: Okay.
SHORT: All right.
COX: Thank you.
SHORT: Five minutes.
[Break]
SHORT: Getting back to your race for Governor, Georgia's a big state and
requires a lot of capital for television, and radio, and that sort of thing.
It's frightening to me to try to understand how you can raise that kind of money
00:41:00in order to run a race. How did you do it?
COX: Well, that--that is definitely the hardest part of any, any election
today, but especially a statewide election in Georgia, because the state is so
large and you cannot hope to win a statewide election without mass media,
without radio and TV to really reach the almost five million voters in this
state. You can shake hands until your hand falls off, and you have to do that,
and you want to do that, but you'll never reach enough voters to make a
difference to get known statewide and to get your message known statewide. So
you have to raise an enormous amount of money. It was certainly an advantage to
have run two previous statewide races for Secretary of State before I got into
the Governor's race, because I already knew the drill. It's not fun. A few
people, like maybe Roy Barnes, like raising money, but most of us don't. But, you
00:42:00know, it just has to be done and it has to be done every day of a campaign. And
you have to spend an enormous amount of time on the phone calling people and
introducing yourself, and talking about your vision for the state, and asking
them to support you. And the anxiety is always on the candidate's side of the
phone. People are incredibly generous and I found that out in my first race as
Secretary of State. I mean, how do you call somebody I don't even know and ask
them to send me $500? Well, they do it, because they're interested in good
government and people are incredibly generous to candidates in this state. So,
jumping into the Governor's race, I knew that would be critical to us. I hired a
good staff of finance people, who help you research people and find phone
numbers and set up your whole day of calls to make and that kind of thing, and
00:43:00ultimately raised about $6 million for the primary in 2006, which is--was almost
identical to what my Democratic primary opponent raised except for the family
money his dad was able to toss in.
SHORT: Well, speaking of that, how do you feel about public financing?
COX: In theory, it makes a lot of sense. In practice, I don't know how you do
it in a way that's really fair and equitable. Are you going to just put tax
dollars out in front of anybody who decides they want to be a candidate and be
on TV? How are you going to create a threshold to decide if somebody's viable?
And even if you have public finance under--at least under current U.S. Supreme
Court precedent--you're never going to be able to limit somebody from putting
their own personal money into a race. So in some respects personal--public
00:44:00finance could be a bad thing, because it would give an enormous advantage to a
rich candidate who could always throw in their own money. I mean, to some extent
that's what happens now, but I don't know that the tax payers of this country
are ready to go there until they can see a system that really looks to be fair.
On the other hand, they're disgusted with the current system. Candidates are
disgusted with the current system and all the pressure for money goes to the
cost-- particularly of television because you just cannot reach votes in today's
society without a huge infusion of television, and it's incredibly expensive.
SHORT: May I ask you an iffy question?
COX: Maybe I'll answer it, maybe I won't.
(laughter) SHORT: If you were elected, what would have been your first
00:45:00legislative program?
COX: Well, that's easy to answer because that's what I talked about for so long
while I was campaigning for Governor. And without question it would have been
education and it would have been an emphasis on the early years of education.
Because we have thrown money at education. We've thrown it in all different
directions in education. We're still not seeing the results that we deserve in
this state. We're not doing right by our children. But nobody's ever looked at
the research of what really helps a child's brain develop, and there is so much
research out there that will tell you if a child is not reading on grade level
by the third grade, there is about an 85% chance that child is going to be a
high school dropout. And if they're going to be a high school dropout, there is
00:46:00an enormous percentage of opportunity that they're going to end up in prison
where we're going to be spending $20,000, $30,000 a year to keep them
incarcerated. So let's look at what seems to be so obvious. Do we want to spend
that kind of money to lock up people in prison or let's spend $20,000 or $30,000
a year for children from birth to the third grade and give every child an
opportunity to have their brain developed based on research--to teach them the
reading skills that really give them a chance to succeed. And then we've got a
great chance to keep them in high school and then get them into college, and
then make them productive members of society. But nobody in elective office in
this state has ever been willing to really follow the research, because it's not
an overnight result. No politician who does that is going to be able to say two
00:47:00years down the road or four years at the next election, look at the proof of
what I've done. It's going to be a long-term process, but I was willing to do
that and that was the approach that I felt could have long-term implications for
improving all of society by better educating our children.
SHORT: What would have been your environmental program?
COX: Well, I would like to think I would have paid some attention--again--to
the science and the research of where we were going, where water resources were
going, and done something to better prepare for a likely or inevitable drought
that we've certainly had in 2007. In those days, in the late nineties and into
the early 2000s, there were plans on the drawing board in environmental agencies
of the state to build water reservoirs to better trap water and help us prepare
for droughts. The first year that Governor Perdue was in office, he wiped all of
00:48:00that off the books and reallocated all the money to other resources. And I would
like to think I would have not only paid attention to what we needed to do for
the long haul, but that that I would have been a conservation Governor and put
some emphasis on what we needed to do in building codes and in basic day-to-day
usage to better promote water conservation, to help us be better stewards of our
environment in the long-term and the short-term. But nobody's paid any attention
as far as I can see to much of anything on the environmental table in this state
for the last four or five, six years.
SHORT: How do you feel about these programs designed to move people between
Athens and Atlanta, and Macon and Atlanta, and Atlanta and Chattanooga by use of
rapid rail?
COX: I was a big proponent of rapid rail--again, because look around the world.
00:49:00Look at the great cities on this earth and they are all--with almost the
exception of Atlanta--moving people around by transit and rapid rail, and other
newer forms of train and electronic kind of train and tram systems. And we were
just very much behind the curve in Georgia. I thought the rail line from Atlanta
to Athens was a great idea and to start looking at building the infrastructure
for major traffic corridors to do something other than building more highways to
move people. I got very frustrated with the arguments, "Oh, we can't subsidize a
train system.” Well, every highway in this state is subsidized. So why not put
in a more efficient way of moving people around, a quicker way, subsidize it,
00:50:00and let it grow, and let it help the whole economy. But--and I came out in favor
of rapid rail during my campaign for Governor.
SHORT: Before we get off the subject of politics, let's talk for a minute about
parties. We've seen a great shift in recent years to the Republican party. What
do you think has caused that?
COX: Well, Georgia was kind of slow to come to the party--I guess, come to the
Republican Party. If you look around the country, almost all of the other
Southern states sort of went Republican before Georgia did, and I think the
reason we were at the end of the pack is because Georgia Democrats by and large
were pretty similar to national Republicans a few years ago. They were fiscally
conservative. They were socially moderate to conservative and those were a lot
00:51:00of the tenets of the early national Republican movements in the sixties and
seventies and eighties, I guess. And Georgia really, if you look at national
elections--Presidential elections in particular, Georgia voted for a Republican
President almost every election since Eisenhower except for Carter and Clinton's
first election. Maybe I'm missing one or two, but we had already kind of aligned
ourselves with a national Republican movement decades ago, but the Georgia state
elected Democrats were still very much conservative and aligned, and were able
to hold off that movement until the wave really nationally finally got to
Georgia in the nineties.
SHORT: Can you foresee any situation where the Democratic party can rebound?
COX: Yes I can, and you can almost see the beginnings of that movement--from
00:52:00what I'm reading--going into the 2008 legislative session in Georgia. A lot of
the business community that has tended to be very supportive of Republican
politics has been scared to death by some of the Republican policies they have
seen promoted in Georgia during 2007. They are scared to death of some of the
just off the wall ideas coming out of some of the Republican leadership and the
legislature and they're moving back and putting their dollars back into
Democratic campaigns and to the Democratic legislative caucus, because they want
to go back to some of the good old days of moderation. That's part of our state
motto. I think it's what Georgia Democrats have really believed in. It's what
has made our business environment so healthy and vibrant, but the business
00:53:00leadership I think has seen some frightening signs that some of the Republican
leadership--certainly not all--but some of the leadership is going off in a
dangerous direction that will be very damaging to our economy. And they're going
back towards Democrats that they think will be more moderate.
SHORT: You know, I was very impressed by a statement made on this program by
Senator Johnny Isakson, who said that he feels the difference today between the
Republican party in Georgia and the Democratic party in Georgia is the fact that
they have a bench, that they have candidates coming along and coming along. And
when I look at this upcoming election--say in the Senatorial race, the
Democrat--the people running as Democrats, most people don't know and some of
them have never heard of them. So is there a way that the Democratic party can
do that? Can they recruit candidates? Is it possible under their present leadership?
00:54:00
COX: I think probably the recruitment process will be helped by the same
situation that the business location has been looking at as radical, wacko kind
of ideas have come out of some of the Republican leadership. That has encouraged
potential candidates to say, "I don't want to line up with that kind of
stuff.” And I think that has and will continue to help the Democrats recruit.
But I think Senator Isakson is right, because in Georgia we had for a long time
such stable leadership with Tom Murphy as Speaker, with Zell Miller as
Lieutenant Governor and Governor. There wasn't a lot of opportunity to move up
to the top of the totem pole and it probably did stagnate the Democratic party
for a while. At the same time, the Republicans are clamoring to grow. They're
00:55:00organizing, they're training new people and we weren't in that mode as
Democrats. And I think that has been to our detriment over the years, and we're
now having to get back into that mode of being like Republicans were 20 years
ago--creating a bench, training candidates, bringing people into the fold,
working on good public policy, and I think in decades you'll see swings back and
forth both ways.
SHORT: Now, I'd like to talk about Young Harris College.
COX: Good.
SHORT: You're here, bright future, a lot of things going on. Tell us what's happening.
COX: There's so much happening at Young Harris College that is just exciting
beyond words. The trustees voted in the spring of 2007 unanimously to grow the
college from a two-year institution into a great four-year liberal arts college.
00:56:00Back almost before 1900, it actually was a four-year college, but for the vast
majority of its 120 plus year history it has been a two-year Methodist
affiliated college. But the trustees have made that commitment and that was
their number one challenge to me in appointing me as President in the summer of
2007. So we are on a very ambitious time table. I said to someone just
yesterday, maybe it's only like a crazy Secretary of State that would try to
implement electronic voting in one year that a crazy freshman college President
would try to do all this in about 18 months. But we hope to submit to SACS, the
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, our application in the spring of
2008 to offer our first five baccalaureate degree programs. And under the SACS'
timetable, we would have a one-year waiting period and hopefully that means by
00:57:00the fall of 2009, we will have a junior class here on campus at Young Harris
College. That sounds like it ought to be real easy, but that involves--it's
almost like creating a college from scratch. We have to decide on every major we
want to offer, what faculty we need to hire, what buildings we need to build,
and what we want to be, what we want to be known for, what we want to be best
at, how do we distinguish ourselves from other four-year colleges. So it's an
incredibly exciting process and I think our campus is very engaged in seeing the
chance for their dreams for this college to come true and putting into action
ideas that they had always hoped to see on this campus. Ultimately, we're doing
this because I think it will better serve our students. Today, college bound
students know they need at least a four-year degree to be successful and so it's
00:58:00become harder and harder to recruit students to private two-year colleges, not
just for Young Harris. This has happened all over the country and so we find
ourselves in a situation of saying, "Well, we can spend all of the great
endowment that we have to recruit students here for two years and then see them
leave, or we can serve their needs in this great valley as a great four-year
institution.” So I think the trustees have made the right decision and we are
up to our eyeballs in the planning right now to make it happen.
SHORT: Have you--you have not determined what degrees you will be awarding?
COX: Well, the first five that we will apply for will be based on areas where
we already have strength. English, music--we already have a nationally
accredited music program--biology, business--kind of a public policy related
business program--and a liberal studies program that's almost like a design your
00:59:00own major--a liberal arts degree where you can concentrate in the humanities, or
in the sciences, or something like that. And we hope that will give a lot of our
students the opportunity who are freshman today to stay with us all four years
because this liberal studies major will enable them to kind of tailor a major to
their interests.
SHORT: Now, I'd like to ask you some personal questions.
COX: My age?
SHORT: No. What is your fondest memory of your public service?
COX: Well, there's an awful lot of fond memories, especially those that go back
to my dad and campaigning with him, and the excitement of waiting to see
election results for him on election night. In my own experience, I guess, it's
been the--probably, I guess from a public perception, the success of electronic
voting, because I had newspapers all over the state, writing editorials. If this
01:00:00fails, this is the end of Cathy Cox, and I was also on the ballot the year that
we implemented this. You know, was I going to lose my election, was this going
to fail, and it succeeded beyond our dreams, and that was probably the most
rewarding accomplishment. But I guess fond memories go to almost kind of mundane
stories where you're walking down the grocery store aisle and somebody stops you
and says, "You know, the HOPE Scholarship is the best thing the government ever
did for me and my family, and my daughter's now got a college degree because of
the HOPE Scholarship," or something that you know you had a part in shaping
public policy or working through red tape, or the bureaucracy of state
government to help somebody with something that might be seemingly unimportant
to the world, but meant an awful lot to that person. That means an awful lot.
01:01:00
SHORT: Biggest disappointment?
COX: Well, losing the election was pretty disappointing! (laughter) But you
go into elections knowing you can win and you can lose. And I guess for me, I
knew that if I lost the election, I enjoyed practicing law and I fully expected
that I would be back practicing law if I lost the election. Didn't dream about
the opportunity to serve as a college President, so I'm really excited to have
this opportunity. But the loss was disappointing, because ultimately you do it
to win. You're disappointed--I was disappointed during the campaign, because you
find out that in politics you have a lot of fair weather friends, people that
you thought were true blue, with you know matter what, didn't have the nerve in
what we had--a very contentious primary between Mark Taylor and me--didn't have
01:02:00the nerve to come out and support you. And that was disappointing. It was
disappointing to find that our--our ethics laws in this state, or actually I
guess I should say the enforcement of our ethics laws is a total sham, just a
total sham. And things--things go on in elections and there's no mechanism to
arbitrate any level of fairness, and that's a shame. And it's part of what I
think keeps a lot of people out of politics, but it's not healthy for the process.
SHORT: I failed to mention the chair that you hold at the University of
Georgia, the Sanders Chair for Ethics and--
COX: Political Leadership.
SHORT:--Political Leadership. Tell us a little bit about that.
COX: That was a wonderful bonus, I guess, that I got in life when Dean Rebecca
White at the University of Georgia Law School called me in the fall of 2006.
01:03:00After I'd lost the primary, I was talking to law firms around Atlanta about
joining them. I had had a phone call from a trustee at Young Harris College
about whether I would be interested in putting my name in the hat for the
college and I was very interested in that, but I was also dismayed that the
process for searching for a President here was going to take until the next
spring and January I was going to be out of a job. So Dean White asked me to
fill the Sanders Chair, which they fill each semester in the law school, to come
and teach and to teach whatever I wanted to teach related to public policy and
politics. And I thought, "Wow, that would be fascinating. I'd love to teach
election law.” And she said, "Oh, that'd be great. We've never had anybody to
teach election law.” So she allowed me to go over and design my own course in
01:04:00election law, and to teach a second seminar on law and politics, which was a lot
of fun to have an opportunity every week to--I brought in political leaders like
Roy Barnes and Larry Walker and other people that I have so much respect for to
talk about politics and the shaping of the law. So I had a great opportunity in
the law school to do things that I enjoy personally and to hopefully engage a
lot of future lawyers in the elections process and encourage them into public
service. And in fact Governor Sanders said that the chair was designed for that
purpose, to bring in a variety of faculty who could encourage law students to go
into public service at some point in their career. So I hope that I contributed
to his vision. It gave me a great opportunity to be in the classroom. Two of my
sisters, who are educators, laughed at me the whole semester when I talked about
01:05:00how hard and how time consuming it was to prepare for class! But being a
President now I'm so thankful to have had that experience of being in a college
level--graduate level classroom to know what difficulties our faculty have, and
to know that to be a good professor is not an easy thing. So I'm blessed to have
had that opportunity and it was a lot of fun.
SHORT: One final question before we have questions and answers. Is elective
politics in Cathy Cox's future?
COX: No. (laughter) N-O, no. I am so glad that I did what I did and that I had
the opportunities that I had, and truly I don't think I would have ever been
considered for this job had I not had the networks of contacts around the state
and developed what I hope is a positive reputation in politics. I don't think
01:06:00the trustees would have given me the chance to lead this college. So especially
from that standpoint, I'm glad I did it. But to run on a statewide level, you
have to live and breathe it every day. And I had to make that assessment after
the primary in 2006. Bless my husband's heart, the day after the election he
said, "If you want to do this again, I'm with you.” And I had to think about
it for a long time, because to do it again I would have had to get into some
kind of career path that would have given me the time to be out among all kinds
of voting constituencies every day. The public really has no conception of the
time demands on our statewide elected officials. They are enormous and to run
again, you've got to stay in that kind of public spotlight through some means
01:07:00and I guess, frankly, I was just tired of it. There's a lot of it that's fun.
It's a great opportunity to know and meet people, but there's a lot of it that
just wears you down. And I said I'm 48-years-old. I've got a chance to do
something else and still be very successful on another pathway, and wherever the
lord leads me that's where I'm going to go. At about that time I got call from a
Young Harris trustee, and I said, "This is a great path. And I'm glad to be here."
SHORT: You have agreed to answer questions.
COX: Sure.
SHORT: Are there any questions?
MALE AUDIENCE: You were talking about earlier about, you know, the water
problem that we're facing in the state. And in certain legal and political
circles there's been talk that, you know, what falls in Georgia is Georgia's,
what falls in Alabama is Alabama's, what's in Florida is Florida's. If you were
elected and, you know, this issue had come up, how would you have approached the
01:08:00Governors of Florida and Alabama and their concerns for their state, but also
being in charge of Georgia and having the responsibility to the citizens of
Georgia? How would you have, you know, tried to work through what Governor
Purdue is facing now?
COX: Well, kind of like I talked about with education and with other things, I
think the only way you can properly deal with the water issue is to deal first
with the science. And maybe my perspective is a little different because I was
born and raised at the south end of the river water basins in Bainbridge,
Georgia where they clearly see an impact. If Atlanta dries up the Chattahoochee
River, it dries up Lake Seminole and the Apalachicola River and our whole
economy down there. Bainbridge is one of the two inland ports in this state, and
01:09:00if there's not enough water flow in the Apalachicola River, we can't bring barge
traffic up to Bainbridge to help our economy in a very impoverished area of the
state. So all of my life I knew about this water issue of Florida/South Georgia
versus Atlanta. And while certainly human needs should always come first, there
has to be a very strong balance with the whole ecosystem. And it's like this
issue that was tried to be made last year about, "Oh, it's all about saving
mussels and who cares about an ugly old mussel down there in the Flint River or
the Chattahoochee River, or something like that.” Well, those mussels
represent an ecosystem. They're very much like the canary in the mine shaft.
When the mussels die out, it's an indication that something is going really
01:10:00wrong with that whole ecosystem, and I don't think that any of us understand the
implications if we start totally fouling up our ecosystems by arbitrarily
draining watersheds and things like that. So I think we have to pay attention to
the science and the water plan that may or may not be adopted by the legislature
this year, I'm happy to see that at least they've gone back to aligning
districts along river basins and water sheds as opposed to just say in this
county--in this county you're going to be drawing water from this river and when
you start piping water here and there, you're just going to run into more
problems than I think any of us mere humans can understand. So first and
foremost, it just has to be science based and we have to get over being greedy,
wasteful users of water and being better stewards of water and our whole
01:11:00economy. I think as people, I believe, God put on earth we're called to do that
in every aspect of our life including our consumption, and we've got to do
better there.
MALE AUDIENCE: Well, you started your college career at ABAC, I believe,
sort-of a small, rural place. I was just wondering, do you think of that when
you walk around this campus and see these young folks starting out on their
college career and--?
COX: I do think about it. I guess from a humorous standpoint, when I was at
ABAC we had a President who was very formal and aloof, and not very popular with
the students or the faculty and just very distant from everybody. And I remember
thinking at the time, "Boy, if I was a college President I'd be so different,
you know. I'd want the students to feel comfortable around me and not scared of
01:12:00me and that kind of thing.” And I don't know whether I've accomplished that or
will accomplish that, but that has run through my mind a number of times this
fall of trying to have students over to the President's house for dinners and to
interact with them on so many occasions, and to let them see me as a real person
in jeans and sweatpants and walking my dog around, and joking around with
students, and being much more approachable than the model I had for a college
President. But from the positive side, my two-year college experience was so
good and so positive, and I formed so many friendships with roommates and
friends that I still keep in contact with now all the time--with email and, you
know, we're just lifelong buds. And I know that our students have that same
01:13:00opportunity in this close knit environment, and that shapes a lot of what I hope
we can do as we move to four years is to make sure we never lose that
environment for our students to form those kind of relationships. I still am in
touch with faculty members that I had at ABAC and I think our students feel the
same way about the faculty here, because they're approachable and they know the
faculty care about them. And that's important as we hire new faculty to make
sure we bring in that brand of new hire that cares about students to that degree
that we can continue offering that environment to our students.
FEMALE AUDIENCE: How is your husband adjusting to life in a small town?
(laughter) COX: My mother was so worried about that. She said, "Well, Cathy's
lived in a small town.” But Mark's never lived in a small town and he just
loves it. You know, he did--when he--his father was in the Air Force and so he
lived sort-of all over--not the air force, the Navy--he lived all over the world
01:14:00until he was in elementary school. But when his father retired and went to Emory
Dental School, they lived in Decatur, and Decatur was kind of a small town in
those days. It was not Atlanta. And he feels like he had a little bit of a small
town childhood, not like Bainbridge exactly, but he has come to love Bainbridge
in the years of being married to me and knowing people there, and knowing
whenever he's in Bainbridge he can go by the drugstore in the morning and see
all the boys that are solving the world's problems having coffee and know that
kind of environment exists. And so, he loves it. He especially loves the fact
that he has found a lawyer to share space with in Hiawassee and it's about as
many miles from our house on the campus to downtown Hiawassee as it was from our
home in Atlanta to his office in downtown Decatur. But as he loves to point out,
he has 25 less traffic lights to go through. (laughter) COX: So he really
01:15:00enjoys telling his friends in Atlanta how easy it is to get to work. He goes to
work in blue jeans. His office looks out over Lake Chatuge, takes Jake, our dog,
to work. He goes--he's a pilot. He has a small airplane and so today, for
example, he's in Atlanta for depositions. So he could be in Atlanta when he
needs to, but for the vast majority of his work he gets to enjoy the good life
up here with all of us. So he's very, very happy.
MALE AUDIENCE: I want to talk to you a little bit now about politics and,
specifically, campaigning. Your campaign and Governor Purdue's campaign along
with Marc Heathers' campaign had a lot of young staffers, particularly campaign
managers. Can you explain that trend on a national level and on a state level?
COX: It's very easy to explain and I think people who have been in those
positions will tell you that being a campaign staff person is a young person's
01:16:00job, because there is nothing that will burn you out faster than the demands of
working on a major campaign. It is far preferable for candidates to find young,
unmarried staff people who are political addicts, kind of like you, kind of like
me, who don’t mind putting in 20 hours a day, who don't have the family
obligations that require them to get home and put supper on the table, and visit
with their children, and have those family times--that they have all the time in
the world to give to a campaign. And statewide and national campaigns run at
such a furious pace. Things change on the flip of a dime and you have to have
staff to help you react and respond quickly to attacks and everything else that
happens. It's constant scheduling and there is a definite reason you don't see
01:17:00older people running campaigns, because they just get burned out. They do it for
a few years and they say, "I'm over this. I want a life where I'm not traveling
to different parts of the country and living out of temporary apartments. I want
some stability in my life.” And the vast majority of top notch campaign
staffers don't live like that. They do it for a number of years until they just
can't take it anymore. But it's a great life and a lot of exciting things to do
for a short run. You wish as a candidate a lot of times you had a little more
seasoned and mature advisors, but they're just hard to come by.
MALE AUDIENCE: You mentioned the Hope Scholarship a while back. Now that you're
the President of a private college, what do you think about the way the Georgia
treats private institutions differently from public institutions concerning the
01:18:00HOPE Scholarship?
COX: Very unfair and very much not in line with Zell Miller's vision for the
HOPE scholarship. Senator Miller--then Governor Miller--can certainly speak for
his own ideas, but it seemed clear to me when he started the HOPE Scholarship,
and I got into the legislature in 1993 right after the constitutional amendment
had passed to allow the lottery, and so the HOPE Scholarship was just starting
up. And in those days he designed the HOPE Scholarship so that private colleges
got virtually an equal appropriation per student as a public college student
got. Because his thought--and he talked about this in his speeches--was that
it's really to the state's benefit to get more students to go to private
colleges. Because at the time, say if it cost the state of Georgia $5,000 to
educate a child in a public college, then the HOPE Scholarship was going to pay
01:19:00for that, but if we could give $3,000 to a private college, we'd get the same
result. We'd get Georgia students educated in Georgia, which enhances the chance
they would stay in Georgia to work and raise their families, and we'll get it
done at less cost to our taxpayers. But over the years, public college tuition
has grown and the HOPE Scholarship covers every dime of it. Private college
tuition has grown, but the HOPE Scholarship has stayed at the same $3,000 level
that it started in the early 1990s and therefore it is less help to students who
choose to go to a private college. So Governor Miller's idea is not being seen
through at the moment because of the legislature's--I won't say refusal--I don't
01:20:00know that anybody's really put it on the table for them to vote on, but they've
been unwilling to raise that HOPE Grant to private colleges in a level to equal
public colleges. And I think they should, because the ultimate benefit to
Georgians is greater when you do that. You might be the CFO of a college here
interested in that?
(laughter)
SHORT: Other questions? If not, thank you.
COX: Thank you.
SHORT: We enjoyed having you.
[END OF RECORDING]