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Campaigning Isn't Same As Governing

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By TOM JACKSON, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 13, 2008

Fourteen months later, Michael Cox's indefatigable race for the county commission's District 4 seat remains the standard to which all insurgent campaigns hereabouts will be compared. Not in terms of strategy - Cox's shoe-leather campaign was older than democracy itself - but as measured by energy, zeal and singular purpose.

To overcome incumbent Steve Simon's advantages in experience, name recognition and financing, Cox conducted an operation based on a single, simple theme: In the 2006 race, there were only two types of right hands in Pasco County, those Cox already had shaken, and those he would.

To achieve that end, there was no place he could not go. Discovered at the Dade City fundraising launch of Republican Will Weatherford's state legislative campaign, Cox, a past chief of Pasco's Democratic Party and a thoroughgoing blue-state guy, shrugged off an acquaintance's surprise.

"Why shouldn't I be here? I have friends in this room."

More, apparently, than many might have guessed; on Election Day, Cox waltzed to victory. But there is campaigning, and there is governing.

Promises, Promises

And as he rolls into his second year on the board after a force-of-nature rookie season, board observers can see - if Cox so far has not - that the two could not be less alike.

To be sure, events and voter sentiment fell in Cox's favor. But he also promised abundantly. To do something about local property insurance rates. To be proactive in the face of land-use abuses. And, above all, to reform how county government does its budgeting.

We would be remiss if we didn't keep track of Cox's proposals, and how he attempts to go about implementing them.

It was shameful, Cox said in fall 2006, how, with the budget deadline looming, commissioners hauled Sheriff Bob White before them with orders to whack $6million from his $90 million spending plan, and to make it snappy. Where's the long-term planning? he wondered.

'There's A Better Way'

Here is what candidate Cox said in a Pasco Tribune article published Oct. 22, 2006:

"I sit back, and I see what's happening, and I think there's a better way. As a certified financial planner, I bring a set of skills not on the board now. By the way they go about budgeting, I think they need someone new there now."

Having run his financial planner's skill set through the budgeting grinder once, Cox lately fancied a new idea: Let's hire a consultant! This from the campaigner who proclaimed, "I think I could work better, smarter and harder."

Among the great dodges of public life, consultants rank second only to "blue ribbon task forces" in their ability to dent the treasury while redirecting political heat. Although they surely recognized this, Cox's comfort-wise colleagues shot him down last week, a rare but welcome spurning of the new guy.

The Gang of Four's sudden vertebrate reclassification notwithstanding, we will file Cox's attempt to outsource the board's primary responsibility under "Stuff to Remember in 2010" when, presumably, he will seek four more years - not as a glad-handing ball of fire, but as a familiar face defending a record.

Persuading voters to retain a "financial planner" eager to renounce his expertise may prove more difficult than convincing them to depose an officeholder for the sin of Internet golf-club shopping during a board meeting.

But then, Cox is an excellent campaigner.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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