Cox taps into anger among DMV crowds
John Cox barely waited for his campaign bus to stop outside the Department of Motor Vehicles in Fremont on Friday before he was out the door and striding briskly to the line of people outside the government office.
Dressed casually in a checked, long-sleeve work shirt and faded blue jeans, the Republican businessman stopped to shake hands and commiserate with the 30 or so people standing waiting just to get inside the DMV office, where more waiting awaited.
“I’m John Cox and I’m running for governor,” he said to one man. “How long have you been waiting?”
When the man said he’d been there for two hours, Cox just shook his head. “Wow,” he said.
“This is just ridiculous,” he told another man in the line, handing him a bottle of water from a stash that an aide was toting.
“I’m not going to put up with this anymore and I hope you don’t either,” Cox said to a third. “On Nov. 6, we can make a change.”
In recent days, Cox has been buoyed by improving poll numbers and endorsements from some Southern California newspapers. He’s in the midst of a statewide bus tour that took him to Bakersfield, Fresno and San Luis Obispo on Thursday and Salinas, Palo Alto, Fremont, Sacramento and Chico on Friday.
“People are starting to learn who I am and what I will do for the state,” he told reporters standing outside his green-and-white bus, which was emblazoned with his “Help Is On The Way” campaign slogan.
Cox, a San Diego-area resident who made numerous unsuccessful
runs for office in his native Illinois, remains a big underdog to Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. While a poll released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that Cox has cut Newsom’s lead in half since July, he is still running well behind the former San Francisco mayor, 51 percent to 39 percent.
Newsom is better financed and better known across California, where no Republican has been elected to statewide office since 2006.
But California has become a failing state, Cox argues, with bad schools and worse government. Housing has become unaffordable, he says, the price of gas is approaching $4 a gallon and the state is spending money in all the wrong places.
The state’s problems have only gotten worse during Newsom’s eight years as lieutenant governor, Cox said, calling him “part of the political class” that has failed the state.
“I’m running for governor because I’m not going to take this anymore,” he said. “The people of California are crazy for change.”
Newsom spokesman Nathan Click countered in an email, “Californians don’t want a Trump protege like Cox as chief executive of this state, and no amount of desperate and dishonest attacks will change that fact.”
For Cox, the DMV is a very visible symbol of California’s problems. Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered an audit of the agency in the face of growing complaints about hours-long waits for service at offices and the weeks it can take to even get an appointment.
“This is the seventh DMV office I’ve visited,” Cox said. “It’s just one sign of how unlivable and unaffordable California is. People have to take time off work to get their licenses.”
The DMV offices are a focus for the frustration California residents have with state government. Inside the Fremont office Friday, every chair was filled and a line of people snaked around the room and out the door.
A sign on the door suggested just how angry the people there can get:
“Notice — Threatening a state employee is unlawful and may result in a fine or imprisonment.”
The DMV “is a symptom” of the state’s problems, Cox said. As governor, he said, he would spend the money needed to update the agency’s aging computers and let it “do its job properly.”
The promises struck a chord with at least some of those waiting in line.
“We’re voting for you,” a woman told Cox.
But Cox has never run a statewide campaign in California, and at times it shows.
Talking to a man waiting in line, Cox told him that California was spending billions of dollars on the highspeed rail project, “which is being built in the middle of nowhere, by the way.”
The problem, though, is that the first phase of the train system is under construction in the Central Valley, one of the state’s more Republican areas and a center of Cox’s support. Residents of Fresno, which as the nation’s 32nd-largest city is larger than not only Miami, Cleveland and New Orleans, but also Sacramento and Oakland, have bristled in the past about similar cracks from candidates from the coast.
Cox hastily walked back his remarks during his news conference. Both Fresno and Bakersfield are important cities at the heart of the state’s agriculture industry, he said.
“But there aren’t thousands of people traveling between them every day, like Los Angeles and San Francisco,” he said.