Cover Story: Georgia's next governor?

The most dangerous woman in Georgia politics sets off a mild stir when she walks into the modest banquet room in Macon, just enough of a low rumble in the crowd of 100 or so to make people look up from their sweet tea.

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She's trim, blond, with a warm, slightly asymmetric smile; when she speaks, a distinct twang betrays her South Georgia upbringing. After greeting well-wishers and shaking a few hands, she takes her place in the buffet line and finally settles down to lunch before being introduced to deliver her stump speech at the Bibb County Democratic Party's monthly gathering.</
Seen up close, Cathy Cox hardly seems a threatening presence, or even an obvious attention-grabber. She's soft-spoken and friendly, yet clear about what she wants to say. She comes across as smart and savvy, but doesn't browbeat folks with her intellect. At every opportunity, she describes herself as unlike most politicians: inclusive and willing to listen to all sides, with little appetite for partisan wrangling.</
In fact, that might be exactly why the Georgia secretary of state has so rattled Republicans — and a few old-school Democrats, too.</
Cox, 47, is not a battle-scarred politico haunted by a record of gotcha soundbites and a long list of enemies. Her closets seem almost improbably skeleton-free. Many observers, therefore, have tagged her as the Democrats' brightest hope for beating Sonny Perdue in the 2006 governor's race, little more than 11 months away.</
Of course, in politics a year is an eternity. In that time, Cox, a largely untested candidate, must face veteran brawler Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor in the Democratic primary. It remains to be seen how she will hold up under the withering barrage of a heated race, or whether her aggressive push for electronic voting might prove an Achilles' heel.</
Still, Cox already has shaken up Peach State politics by roaring out of the gate with a fully tooled campaign. Prohibited by law from collecting political contributions during the General Assembly this spring, the secretary of state quickly made up for lost time, blindsiding Taylor by out-fundraising him by $1.5 million to $2 million in the year's first reporting period.</
Cox shocked Taylor again in August, when 54 state House Democrats signed a petition formally endorsing her as the gubernatorial nominee. Even some who didn't sign, such as House Minority Leader DuBose Porter, D-Dublin, make no secret of their support for Cox.</
By most accounts, Cox has gained the early momentum in the primary race. The most recent statewide poll, conducted in late October by Strategic Vision, an Atlanta-based consulting firm, shows Cox leading Taylor by a full 10 points among Democratic voters. (The same poll, however, shows both of them lagging well behind Perdue among all voters.)</
For the past few months, conversations at Democratic gatherings have been thick with rumors of highly placed party honchos quietly asking Taylor — aka the "Big Guy" — to step aside and spare Georgia Democrats from a scorched-earth primary that is certain to leave the winner, in the words of one Democratic operative, "bruised, battered and broke."</
Short of Taylor's unlikely withdrawal, the Cox campaign is banking on her perceived niceness — a combination of a Southern upbringing and well-honed professionalism — to set her apart from Taylor, who, like his mentor, Zell Miller, has a hot temper. But while Cox colleagues and longtime observers affirm that she is as likeable in private as she seems in public, they say it's Cox's lesser-known side — as a shrewd, no-nonsense administrator — that will be essential to her political aspirations.</
Tom Bordeaux, a Savannah Democrat who served with Cox when she was in the state House, observes: "Cathy Cox is exactly as she appears to be — straightforward and low-key — but she's also hard-nosed and businesslike. Anybody who knows her knows she's not soft."</
Former Public Service Commissioner Bobby Rowan describes Cox as "very tough, well-organized. As Gov. [George] Busbee's slogan went, 'She's a workhorse, not a showhorse.' But she has more personality than Busbee ever had."</
"Cathy is not the typical politician," says a former department head in the secretary of state's office under Cox. "She's all business. She's not a glad-hander or good ol' boy. You really can't get much past her."

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Cox herself simply says, "I'm not a shouter." She recounts her ability, as a trial attorney, to remain civil and composed while hammering home her point.</
It's a skill that will be sorely tested over the next year.</
Cathy Cox has followed in her father's footsteps, even though, strictly speaking, he might not have approved.</
"My dad didn't want his daughters in politics," recalls Cox, the oldest of four sisters. "Of course, he also hated lawyers."</
The late Walter Cox was a pillar of the community in their hometown of Bainbridge, tucked deep into the southwest corner of the state. Her father became councilman, then mayor, then the county's state representative for 16 years. Her mother, Mary, still living, is an artist known for her drawings of local landmarks.</
"My childhood was idyllic in many ways," Cox told the gathering in Macon, "but also odd, because I grew up in a funeral home."</
A second-generation funeral director — and second-generation mayor — Walter Cox turned his front porch into an meeting place for friends and townsfolk who came to discuss problems and talk politics. It was there, a block from downtown Bainbridge, that Cox says she developed a sense of public service.</
Mary Cox says she first noticed her oldest daughter's affinity for politics when the young Cox served as a Capitol intern while her father was a legislator.</
"She's always had an interest in public speaking and writing and entered every local speech competition she could find," her mother adds. "She seemed to me to be suited to be a lawyer."</
Steve Elrod, a Bainbridge insurance broker who remembers "running in the same circles" as Cox, counts himself among her admirers, largely for what he sees as a genuine desire to serve others.</
"Those [Cox] girls grew up just as common as anybody," he says. "Except for Cathy, they just have normal lives and normal jobs. I don't know anyone who doesn't like her. She's so squeaky clean, it's weird."</
In fact, to spend time talking with Cox's friends and acquaintances is enough to make one wonder if she shouldn't instead be a candidate for sainthood.</
Yet state Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, D-Decatur, says that, as someone also raised in a political family, she has no trouble believing Cox is as wholesome as she appears. "If you grow up around politics, you know in the back of your mind that you've got to be squeaky clean," Benfield says. "Cathy probably always thought she might want to get into politics at some point."</
When Cox went to college, it was to the nearby two-year Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton. "My first love is gardening," she says. "But after I'd pulled weeds next to people with Ph.D.s in botany, I decided that a job in the air conditioning wouldn't be the worst idea."</
She next headed to the University of Georgia, where she earned a degree in journalism. Sam Griffin, editor and publisher of the Bainbridge Post-Searchlight, remembers Cox fondly from her summer internships in his newsroom, and later when she returned as a full-time reporter.</
"She's very thorough," Griffin says. "She plans ahead and knows exactly what she wants to do. I don't know anyone who has anything derogatory to say about her."</
After a stint with the Gainesville Times and her hometown paper, where she covered everything from the police beat to local government, Cox left for law school.</
"Originally, I thought learning about the law would help me in journalism," she says, "but then I decided I wanted to practice law."</
After finishing Mercer Law School, where she was editor of the school's law review, she took a job at the prestigious Atlanta firm of Hansell & Post. In 1988, Cox moved back to Bainbridge to practice law and be near her father, then a seven-term legislator, who had been diagnosed with cancer.</
As the only female attorney within an hour's drive, Cox handled her share of cases for women — child-support agreements, custody disputes and, of course, contentious divorces.</
Even then, she seems to have avoided making enemies.</
Longtime acquaintance Elrod says Cox once represented a friend's wife in a divorce; after the case was over, his friend said of his ex's attorney: "You can't help but like her."

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When Walter Cox died in 1989, his seat was won in a special election by Kermit Bates, a construction consultant who later switched from Democrat to Republican. Cox says she wouldn't have run against Bates, a family friend, but when reapportionment put him in a different district, she decided to follow her father's example and run for his old seat.</
Bates' widow, Sally, says her late husband thought so much of Cox — whom the couple had known since she baby-sat for their children — that he would have set aside his own political aspirations if the two had been forced to run for the same seat.</
"Cathy was always mature and had good judgment," Bates recalls. "She fit comfortably into any group, regardless of age or gender. We knew she would go far."</
In 1992, Cox handily defeated 16-year veteran Ralph Balkcom, an elderly farmer from nearby Blakely who, Cox says, took her for granted, not imagining that a 32-year-old female lawyer posed much of a threat in a corner of Georgia that had never before sent a woman to the Statehouse.</
When she ran for re-election two years later, Cox was unopposed.</
During her two terms in the state House, Cox put her experiences with women and children's issues to work, passing legislation to set guidelines for computing child-support payments. Designed to protect children of broken homes, Cox's bill was so contentious that the GBI assigned officers to guard her after she received threatening phone calls.</
Just this year, in a hotly contested reversal, Republicans threw out Cox's child-support rules, passing new legislation that critics say will mean less stability for many children of divorced parents.</
Cox makes no secret of her desire, as governor, to correct what she sees as an injustice.</
"I'm very, very worried about the new child-support formula," she says. "Why should children suffer because their parents separate?"</
State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, the House's reigning expert on children's issues, remembers Cox as "a very able legislator and a consistently hard worker. She's exceptionally talented as a lawyer, a politician and a person."</
Oliver, who in 1998 lost a bruising primary race for lieutenant governor to Mark Taylor, predicts that Cox's political skills will serve her well against him.</
Says Oliver: "In this race, I think Taylor has met his match."</
Cox's big break came in 1996, when then-Secretary of State Max Cleland stepped down to run for the U.S. Senate, and Lewis Massey, a young Democratic operative, was appointed to the post by then-Gov. Zell Miller. Massey plucked Cox from the Statehouse to serve as his second-in-command. Two years later, he jumped ship to run for governor, and she easily won election to his position.</
Even before taking the oath of office, Cox rocked the boat by announcing her plan to relocate the state Professional Licensing Boards — the largest division under her office's control, responsible for issuing licenses for such diverse fields as dentistry, acupuncture therapy and landscape architecture — from Atlanta to Macon. Cox held firm despite employee complaints, explaining that the move would provide more centralized access to an office that serves the entire state, save money through lower rent, and provide a small boost to the Macon economy.</
State Sen. George Hooks, D-Americus, who's served in the House and Senate for 25 years, says Cox won his admiration early on for sticking with sometimes tough decisions.</
"She's what we call a 'steel magnolia,'" Hooks says. "She's well-liked and poised, but also driven, with a Type-A personality. I can't imagine her playing cards or just sitting around."</
Cox threw much of her attention into overhauling her office's website to allow for online license renewal, create an easily maneuverable database of private Georgia corporations, and provide for political campaign disclosures to be posted online for public inspection almost as soon as they're filed — a step that earned her rebukes behind closed doors from some of the more ethically compromised members of her party.</
Under Cox, the secretary of state's office soon became a widely recognized model of efficiency and customer service at a time when incompetence at other state agencies was making headlines, such as when the Georgia Department of Revenue was forced to admit it had lost track of how much sales tax money was owed to individual counties.</
Division heads who served under Cox credit her hands-on management style for shaking up what had been a fairly laid-back office under the easy-going Cleland. Her grasp of details and leadership of the department engendered a strong loyalty among staff that made people eager to carry out her orders, they say.</
"Cathy Cox is a quick study and a strong leader within her department," says one. "There's something about her that engenders the kind of loyalty where people want to do what she wants done, the way a corporal receives a message from a colonel."</
Yet despite Cox's success, she must overcome the fact that, as a woman in one of the state's top elected posts, she's still something of a novelty.</
A few months before Cox's re-election in 2002, the AJC ran a lengthy profile that was primarily concerned with her wardrobe, leaving readers with the image of their secretary of state as a canny outlet shopper.</
And during a recent speech to a women's business gathering in Buckhead, Cox spoke good-naturedly of always being described in print by the clothes she wears and being asked questions that male politicians rarely face: How many children do you have? (Single until age 41, Cox has none.) How does your husband feel about your running for governor? (He couldn't be prouder. A Decatur attorney, his name is Mark Dehler, which rhymes with "Taylor" — which could be an issue in itself.)</
State Rep. Benfield says that while Cox enjoys bargain-hunting and gardening and has a well-developed sense of humor, people shouldn't mistake her for a lightweight.</
"She pretty much eats, breathes and sleeps politics," Benfield says.</
Still, one of the unwritten benefits of being an elected state department head is the opportunity to be in the public eye while remaining above the fray of Gold Dome politics. While Mark Taylor was busy battling Republican lawmakers — first as Zell Miller's Senate floor leader; then as lieutenant governor under Gov. Roy Barnes, dismissing GOP leaders with a sarcastic "Cry me a river"; and finally as a highly vociferous critic of Gov. Perdue — Cox was quietly managing her office and staying out of the partisan mud-slinging.</
Republican leaders, worried about the threat posed by the secretary of state's impressive public profile, approached Cox at the end of last year, offering her a place on the GOP ticket as lieutenant governor if she would switch parties.</
"The same day I said no, I got my eviction notice," says Cox, referring to a Republican order this January to move a chunk of her offices out of the Capitol — a measure that many Gold Dome pundits saw as one of the most pettily partisan maneuvers in a long season of petty partisanship. (GOP leaders said they needed the space.)</
On the campaign trial, Cox is billing herself as the antidote to such partisanship.</
"I'm not asking anyone to elect me just because I'm a Democrat, and I'm not going to bully anybody into switching parties, because I don't care which party you're in," she told the Macon crowd. "We need a leader who can forget partisanship."</
If there's a single issue that could prove a millstone around Cox's neck, it would be, paradoxically, the very thing that many folks consider her biggest triumph: making Georgia the proving ground for electronic voting.

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Even when she was assistant secretary of state, Cox had advocated standardizing Georgia voting machines; at the time, depending on where you lived, you might be confronted with a punch-card, a paper ballot, a lever machine or an optical scanner.</
When the disastrous 2000 presidential election made Florida, with its "butterfly ballots" and hanging chads, the laughing stock of the democratic world, Cox was quick to admit publicly that Georgia's polling problems had been worse. The Peach State had recorded 94,000 uncountable votes for president, amounting to 3.5 percent of all votes cast in that race, compared to Florida's slightly less outrageous 2.9 percent, she told a U.S. Senate committee. Only President Bush's wide margin of victory in Georgia had spared our state similar embarrassment.</
So in early 2001, Cox launched a high-profile campaign to bring Georgia voting into the computer age with ATM-style voting machines.</
While other states such as Maryland and Nevada were taking it slow, proposing to roll out touch-screen voting gradually, Cox made an ambitious promise that many saw as undeliverable: All 159 Georgia counties would be outfitted with identical voting machines in time for the November 2002 midterm elections.</
In April of that year, with only six full months to go, Cox's office selected Ohio-based Diebold Inc. over six other bidders to receive the $54 million contract to deliver more than 22,000 voting machines. The company had been selected in part because of its qualifications as a leader in ATM and security-system technology, Cox said.</
Almost immediately, Cox had to contend with criticism of her choice. Diebold had not been the low bidder. And rumors swirled that the company had gotten the nod because its chief Georgia lobbyist was none other than Cox's former boss and benefactor, Lewis Massey. Cox denied being swayed by Massey's connection with Diebold.</
The secretary also brushed off warnings that Georgia could be vulnerable to election fraud unless its machines provided paper receipts that would make a recount possible. Cox insisted that the touch-screen machines were immune to hackers and that the paper-trail systems available at the time were expensive and unreliable.</
Then there was the brutal timetable. Pundits routinely began to describe Cox's political career as resting on the debut of the new voting machines.</
Cox approached the coming elections with customary focus, holding weekly staff meetings and demanding frequent updates. For Election Day, her office rented thousands of secure telephones that could be used to report polling problems across Georgia.</
But the obvious problems never materialized. There were isolated glitches — frozen screens, defective ballot cards, failed vote encoders — but no widespread system meltdown. The new touch-screen machines were a big hit with voters, who praised them as fast and easy to use. Cox later reported that the volume of uncounted votes in Georgia had dropped to below 1 percent.</
In one move, Cathy Cox had easily won re-election and pulled off a stunning public-relations gamble that seemed instantly to boost her prospects for higher office.</
It wasn't until months after the 2002 elections, when public interest had waned, that the most serious electronic-voting snafus came to light.</
Training for election officials had broken down, so the state was forced to use Diebold employees to oversee voting. The state also was forced to make last-minute software "patches" to get many voting machines to work, then ran out of time to recertify the patched machines before the election, as required by law.</
Some critics even voiced suspicions that voting machine skullduggery caused U.S. Sen. Max Cleland and Gov. Roy Barnes to lose their 2002 re-election bids — although many Democratic political operatives say the two Dems blew those races fair and square.</
In any case, a seriously disputed election could have resulted in a messy scandal for Cox. As it was, though, the problems merely provided fuel for conspiracy theorists and a small network of touch-screen critics.</
As the 2004 presidential election drew near and more states adopted electronic voting, pressure began to build across the country for some form of voting paper trail. Then-former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, D-DeKalb, performed a public demonstration in Washington, D.C., which, she claimed, showed Diebold machines were susceptible to hacking and sabotage.</
Studies by prominent computer-science experts, such as Johns Hopkins' Avi Rubin, issued dire warnings that electronic-voting software was not necessarily foolproof.</
And in 2003, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell caused further outrage and suspicion with his pledge to Bush supporters that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."</
Even though the 2004 elections again went smoothly in Georgia, for many concerned voters, electronic voting without a paper trail began to sound more and more like driving a Porsche without a seat belt — it's a great ride until you hit a tree. Georgia simply hadn't hit a tree yet.</
Republicans jumped on the growing public distrust with both feet. State Sen. Bill Stephens, R-Canton, a floor leader for Gov. Perdue, unsuccessfully pushed bill to require Georgia to adopt a paper-receipt voting system. Stephens, who has since jumped in the race for secretary of state, likely will continue to criticize Cox over the issue.</
Still, Cox resisted calls for a paper trail, a position that baffled many fellow Democrats, who whispered that her perceived stubbornness — viewed by some as an apparent unwillingness to admit she was wrong — would hurt her on the campaign trail.

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"The big head-scratcher in Georgia politics is why Cathy Cox has been so defensive about electronic-voting machines," confided a prominent Democratic legislator in mid-September, just days before Cox announced, seemingly out of the blue, that she was working toward finding a workable paper receipt system for Georgia.</
Cox explains that, when she had to select an electronic-voting system in 2002, "there was no such thing as a paper-trail ballot."</
Even now, she says, only two companies in the nation offer paper receipts, and both those systems are ungainly.</
"I fully understand that people want as much security as possible," she says, "but there's still not a product we can buy that delivers that comfort level."</
Although she has yet to suggest a timetable for adopting paper-trail voting, Cox's public embrace of the concept is now seen by most pundits and even opponents as having effectively insulated her from criticism before the campaign really begins.</
As Rick Dent, campaign manager for Mark Taylor, acknowledges, "I can't imagine Georgians are sitting around their kitchen tables talking about voting machines."</
For now, Cox's biggest political liability seems to be her lack of experience on the campaign battlefield — and in the trenches of the state Democratic Party. Many fellow Dems grumble that the secretary of state has gotten a "free ride" while Mark Taylor has spent his time fighting tooth and nail against such GOP wedge issues as the gay-marriage amendment and tort reform.</
"Cathy Cox benefited from Mark Taylor being the point person opposing the governor," says a veteran Democratic operative closely associated with the lieutenant governor. "Sonny Perdue wouldn't be as vulnerable now if it weren't for Mark Taylor's work."</
Cox dismisses suggestions that she should "wait her turn in line" behind Taylor.</
"This is about who can win the election and govern most effectively," she says. "I'm willing to sit down and talk with anybody who has ideas in order to build consensus." Her unspoken insinuation seems to be, "... unlike the hyper-partisan Mark Taylor."</
But Cox already has waded into her first major fight with state Republicans by vigorously opposing the controversial voter ID law passed earlier this year with Perdue's blessing. A federal judge already has helped her cause by temporarily suspending the law, which requires voters to show government-issued photo ID at the polls and has been criticized for its potential to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters. Still, the GOP leadership seems eager to use it as another wedge issue against Democrats generally, and Cox particularly.</
Randy Evans, legal counsel to the state GOP and a member of the Georgia elections board, has sparred openly with Cox, even insisting that she resign her post "instead of using her position to try to undermine a law she is duty-bound to uphold."</
However the voter ID matter shakes out in court, Cox's efforts are likely to earn her more black votes, further undercutting Taylor's core constituency.</
So far, most of Cox's appeal lies in her personal background and administrative abilities, rather than a campaign platform — less teacher paperwork, more support for mass transit, fewer kids kicked off PeachCare rolls — that, as yet, contains no zingers along the lines of Zell's Georgia Lottery.</
Although Cox's non-partisan image is not a favorite among hardcore Democratic operatives, it certainly has attracted fans downstate, where "Republicans for Cox" bumper-sticker have been popping up.</
Post-Searchlight publisher Griffin, whose late father, Marvin, served a term as governor in the 1950s, describes himself as an "independent conservative," but says he gladly supports his former reporter over Perdue.</
"It will be the first time I've voted for a Democrat since ... ," Griffin pauses for a moment, "since Jack Kennedy."</
Dan Ponder Jr., a former Republican state House member, says he believes Cox's purported desire to reach across the political aisle is genuine — as chairman of her campaign for governor, he's proof of it.</
Ponder, who hails from the even-tinier town of Donalsonville, switched parties in 1997, around the same time Perdue did, but says he's always been a moderate conservative.</
Although he likes Perdue personally, Ponder believes Cox is the candidate best equipped to bridge the widening gaps in Georgia between urban and rural, black and white, liberal and conservative. When he accepted an offer to chair Cox's campaign, Ponder says he got a number of calls from GOP legislators privately supporting his decision.</
"Contrary to what people say, I'm not one of Cathy's worshipful followers who've known her since Sunday school," Ponder says. "I've been in both parties and I've seen their underbellies and I want someone who's going to represent all of Georgia."</
But Alex Pointevint, chairman of the state Republican Party and himself a Bainbridge native, predicts that many of the rural conservatives who claim support for Cox won't vote for a Democrat when the chips are down.</
"She's very much part of the state Democratic machine," he says. "She campaigned for Denise Majette against Johnny Isakson in the U.S. Senate race, which many people aren't likely to forget."</
Even Mary Cox, who believes her daughter is poised to finally break Georgia's political glass ceiling, admits she knows some traditionally minded older women "who are still upset that Cathy didn't take her husband's last name."</
Of course, before Cox can hope to collect potential Republican crossover votes, she must face Mark Taylor — which, if the gov lite's long campaign history is any indication, will be a nasty, bloody affair.</
"How do you campaign against a well-liked, moderate female candidate? It's easier to pummel a guy than a woman," observes Chuck Clay, a former state GOP party head who nonetheless predicts Taylor will find a way to take the gloves off, as he did with gruesome success in his 1998 primary bout with state Rep. Oliver.</
"Mark Taylor is one of the most consistently underrated politicians in Georgia," Clay adds.</
Next year's Democratic primary falls on July 18 — which also happens to be Cox's 48th birthday. Depending on how Georgia Democrats vote, it could be one hell of a party.