Christopher Cox is the kind of big-brain guy who'll never want for a job. When you sport degrees from Harvard business and law schools, people find you. Throw in 17 years in Congress and a reputation as a courtly politician who makes friends instead of enemies, and you're talking about someone who, even at 56, has long-term upside.
So weep not for Mr. Cox.
Still, few get out of this life unscathed. And at the moment, Cox is somewhere nursing his wounds after his departure 10 days ago as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and, if he's at all into irony, perhaps reflecting on the strange-but-true twist that's now part of his biography.
How did he miss the signs that Wall Street was poised for its biggest meltdown in half a century?
We take you back to Orange County 1994, when bad investment decisions by treasurer Robert Citron, long seen as an investment wizard, resulted in the country's largest municipal bankruptcy. The alarm-sounder then was John Moorlach, now a county supervisor but then Citron's election opponent.
Moorlach's campaign chairman was Congressman Chris Cox. And even if he wasn't necessarily part of the brain trust that did the heavy lifting on the Citron record, Cox spoke out immediately afterward, touting Orange County's essential financial soundness and counseling calm in the face of seeming calamity.
A year later, Cox was less measured. After the SEC decided not to levy fines or impose penalties on Orange County officials, Cox said: "The SEC is not just a day late and a dollar short -- they are two years late and $2 billion short."
Point being, Cox was no babe in the woods when it came to the potentially illusory nature of unusually large Wall Street success.
But here we are in early 2009, at the end of Cox's 3 1/2 -year run as SEC chairman, and the conservative Republican has been among those taking a public beating.
This week, Time magazine called the SEC "Washington's most beleaguered agency." It has been pilloried for not spotting the alleged long-running fraud of investment firm owner Bernard Madoff, as well as for laxity in its role as Wall Street watchdog at a time when the nation's economy was foundering.
The book still is not written on Cox's role. To be sure, many observers say it isn't fair to blame him or the SEC for the widespread problems. Others are less charitable, saying Cox's long-standing support of a deregulated market and friendliness to business made him the wrong SEC chairman at the wrong time.
