Cox brochure offers entertainment

JOSEPH N. BELL

Our congressman, Chris Cox, ran up the flag in Newport-Mesa last week

with his mailer, “Annual Report on the United States Government” and

a shot on the Forum page at Pilot Managing Editor Steve Cahn and some

local letter writers.

Cox’s brochure -- which appeared in local mailboxes over his name

as House Policy Committee chairman -- has provided regular January

entertainment since 1989.

This year’s edition offers up four pages of numbers, simplistic

graphs and plugs for the Bush administration wrapped in the creative

interpretation of selective statistics.

It is unflinchingly upbeat -- at least with the Republicans in the

White House. According to “important facts that can be gleaned from

this year’s Annual Report,” Cox tells us, our economy is shaping up

quite well.

As evidence, in a brief summary, Cox points out enthusiastically

that the 2004 deficit is likely to be $100 billion lower than

forecast because of current economic growth, without confusing us by

mentioning -- from the same Office of Management and Budget source --

that the 2004 deficit also increased more than $30 billion over 2003

and will come in at a record level of $412 billion.

In blaming this growth on “unchecked federal spending,” the Cox

report, by some creative spinning, puts most of the onus on a

category it calls “social spending” rather than the war in Iraq.

Almost half of “social spending” is Social Security with a mandated

cost-of-living and beneficiary increase that still add up to less

than 5%, while military spending was up 11% in 2004.

Cox’s timing was fortuitous -- for him -- because if he had waited

another two weeks, his annual report would have arrived along with

Bush’s request for an additional $80 billion to bankroll Iraq and the

Congressional Research Division’s projection of $855 billion in

deficits over the next decade even without the costs of war.

That might have stretched the economic spinning credibility of

even our congressman, who has recently moved from House Policy to the

chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee.

His tiff with Cahn suggests a vulnerability not often exposed to

us home folks. Cahn writes a highly informative local political

column every Thursday, and on one recent week he took issue with an

outrageously excessive claim that Cox made in his final report to the

Policy Committee that “the Republican Party has proven the most

effective political organization in the history of the world.”

There was more in the same vein that stood history on its head by

comparing Reagan-Bush with Abraham Lincoln and generally portraying

the Republican Party as the closest thing we have to the Second

Coming.

I would hope Cox didn’t read this stuff before he signed off on

it, because if he really believes it, we’re in more trouble than I

thought.

But this isn’t the Cahn column that prompted a response from Cox.

That one raised a legitimate question: Do demands for attention

growing out of increasing involvement in affairs of state seriously

diminish the time and effectiveness of a congressman in representing

the specific problems of the people who elected him?

The question surfaced when Cox reached out of his district to help

free a Muslim imam who had been held unfairly by immigration

officials for much too long.

Cox received high praise for his successful handling of this

problem -- but not from some of the folks at home, especially Airport

Working Group vice president Rick Taylor, who wondered in a Forum

letter why this brisk efficiency had never been applied to the

greatest need of his Newport-Mesa constituents: an airport at El Toro

to take the heat off steadily growing demands on John Wayne. And the

barbs apparently drew blood, especially when they were repeated in

Cahn’s column.

So Cox wrote a letter to the Forum in which he called the

suggestion that he is less attentive to his constituents because of

his involvement in outside interests “silly.” He then went on to list

a series of projects addressing local needs that have been funded

through bills he has introduced in Congress. The list is notable for

one important omission. He makes no reference to his involvement --

or lack of it -- in the loss of a commercial airport at El Toro.

He has consistently underestimated the anger directed at him in

his home district for his clandestine work with the Navy to turn El

Toro into a happy hunting ground for developers. A lot of city

council members in both Costa Mesa and Newport Beach have also

underestimated this anger -- Costa Mesa for snoozing through the

whole series of El Toro elections and Newport Beach for focusing its

efforts on extending the caps at John Wayne when El Toro was still

very much in play.

All this seems a long distance away from the “Annual Report on the

United States Government, 2004.” Yet, maybe it isn’t. The growing

deficit between revenues and expenses on the annual report has to

hurt somewhere, and too often these days it is the schools and

airports and reservoirs and streets serving our local constituencies

that are taking the hits.

Somewhere, sometime we will have to decide whether the bleeding in

these places is a reasonable price to pay for the expenses listed in

Cox’s “Annual Report on the United States Government.” And no amount

of spinning of the size and nature of these expenses can be allowed

in making that decision.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.