A Different Vision
Kristen Cox May Be Blind, but Bob Ehrlich's Running Mate Knows Just Where She's Going

By Anita Huslin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 15, 2006

Kristen Cox steps from the back seat of the black GMC Yukon and stands in the parking lot for a moment to get her bearings. An aide warns, "Curb," and then begins to brief her as they enter the building.

In the community room of the Rosemount Towers in Baltimore, 25 or so elderly women are gathered over Dunkin' Donuts and coffee. Cox clicks in her black sling-back heels to the center of the room and launches into the same speech she gave earlier in the day at another subsidized housing complex. She tells them she is the running mate of Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich and she wants to hear what's on their minds.

"Don't raise your hand, 'cause I'm blind," Cox says to the women in their wheelchairs, with their swollen ankles and stooped shoulders. "Speak out, speak out!" she urges.

So they do: Drugs, prostitution, violence. A resident was assaulted here a few years ago. Though Rosemount began as predominantly senior citizens housing 22 years ago, young people have moved in.

Cox nods sympathetically and cues up the empowerment segment.

"If you have a disability, if you're poor, if you're a senior, people kind of write you off," she says. "I live it. I'm running for lieutenant governor and people say. 'What's she doing? She can't be doing that, she's blind.' "

But the women in the audience are not getting the message.

"We've had people come here before," says one, "and so many times they've stalled on the problem."

"Nothing ever gets done about what we want," says another. "The public address boxes do not work in this building and nobody's doing anything about it. It's like we are kicked to the curb."

Cox tells them that it's the city they need to talk to, not the state. She even recommends they call the mayor's office. What she doesn't mention is that Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, is challenging them in the election.

"I would hold your city government accountable," she says. "I'd be the thorn in someone's side. Unfortunately, that's what it takes sometimes. Part of it is being persistent. Part of it is being a pain in the neck if you have to."

Later, Cox considers what she has heard.

"Many of their solutions were looking outside themselves," she says. "It was looking to the governor and it was looking to the property manager."

"The thing that bothers me about that is that at some point in their life, they had given up some of their personal power," she says. "I don't care what your disability is, your age is, your race is, your economic background is . . . people have a lot to contribute."

This is a classic Republican Party message, true, but it's also something Cox, 37, believes to the core. If you stand up, you will be noticed. If you speak up, you may go farther than anyone ever imagined.

The Onset

She got the diagnosis in sixth grade, but looking back she realized that the signs had begun appearing earlier.

She remembers looking up to the night sky and seeing only darkness in the place where her eyes were focused. But if she looked from a different angle, stars would suddenly appear in the very same place. In the center of her eyes, a blind spot was growing.

Stargardt's is a rare genetic disorder that often shows up in childhood as blurring or loss of central vision. It can take several years for sight to completely disappear, but the loss is inevitable and irreversible. In Cox's case, she still had some fuzzy peripheral vision in high school, but she was legally blind.

To read, she used a machine that magnified the pages of her textbooks. The Utah school district where she lived provided one, but would not let her take it home to use for her homework. Her mother sued the district and lost. So she took out a loan and bought Kristen a $3,000 machine to use at home. When it broke en route to Brazil, where Cox was going to serve an 18-month stint as a Mormon missionary, she realized that she would have to learn to do things differently.

"If I was going to have a life, I was going to have to be my own advocate, to articulate what I needed," she says now. "That wasn't always easy to learn. Sometimes people want to take care of you, make choices for you."

Like when her older sister, Tina Eyring, brought Kristen, then a teenager, along to Italy on a business trip and tried to curtail her activities. Kristen informed her in no uncertain terms that she would explore Rome without any restrictions.

"She really made me mad," says Eyring. "I was her sister, and I wanted to take care of her. It was the only argument I ever had with her, and it was about control. From then on, I just supported her."

Well-meaning friends would read to her, but they would sometimes skip over or paraphrase parts of the texts. As the heavy telescopic glasses she wore stopped working, and the machines could no longer magnify the texts large enough for her to read, she hired readers to help her. She used them throughout her studies at Brigham Young University.

Eight years ago, when her first son was a toddler, Cox enrolled in a Baltimore "boot camp" for the blind, where she learned Braille and honed her ability to navigate with a cane. She likes to say that blindness is not her defining characteristic, merely an inconvenience. This, however, has not kept her sightlessness from becoming a campaign issue.

This month on WTWP radio, political commentator Mark Plotkin asked Ehrlich whether he would have selected Cox as his running mate if she weren't blind. This is what's known in the trade as a softball question -- one so easy that the candidate reflexively can spout a prepared answer. But Ehrlich didn't have one ready.

Did he choose Cox because she is blind? "No, but do I think the fact that she cannot see, do I see that as part of a paradigm for what I want to represent? Yes."

Then, unprompted, he continued: "I just want to finish the last question, because I think it's a really fair, good question. In my heart of hearts, I cannot answer honestly if Kris had sight, whether she would be the person I chose. I do not know that. Given my experience with her, my relationship with her, her expertise, her brains, she would certainly be on that list."

Not the ringing endorsement Cox might have expected.

Plotkin said afterward: "I was really quite surprised he didn't give the automatic response, which is 'Of course, Kristen Cox is qualified,' and that's kind of glaring." Cox is currently secretary of the Maryland Department of Disabilities, a cabinet-level position, and before that worked in government relations for the American Federation for the Blind. She has never held elective office.

Her adversary's campaign and its supporters immediately seized on the sound bite.

"I don't think anybody thinks Ms. Cox is ready to become governor at a moment's notice," said Tim Maloney, a lawyer in Prince George's County who is a prominent backer of O'Malley and his running mate, Anthony Brown.

Later, in an interview in her home, Cox responded to the notion that she might be a token, chosen simply as a demographic counterbalance to Ehrlich on the ticket.

"He and I were both ticked because they quoted one-third of the interview, took it out of context," she said. "I heard it played back. His response . . . was that, if I wasn't blind would I be on the list? He said absolutely. Did my blindness make me different and unique? Probably. There were some perspectives, history, that I had that made me who I am. But in the final analysis it was based on my accomplishments and what I could bring."

Learning Curve

It's hard to say what the qualifications of the lieutenant governor should be. It's a position that's simply defined, under the Maryland constitution, as whatever the governor wants it to be.

Lt. Gov. Michael Steele will leave the office perhaps best known for using it as a springboard to run for the U.S. Senate. Cox demurs on any future political ambitions. Instead, she likes to portray herself as a working mother who is raising her two sons, Tanner, 10, and Riley, 15 months, with her husband, Randy Cox -- while running a political campaign and a department with 28 employees. She has hired a nanny for the first time.

She is running on her record as a professional advocate for the blind, and her work at the Maryland Department of Disabilities. This is what she talks about the most at campaign events, private fundraisers and constituent meetings.

On a recent morning, she stands in a gray wool suit before a crowd of about 200 seniors wearing red AARP T-shirts at a candidates' forum in Cambridge. They've come to hear her and Brown speak about what they will do for voters.

"I've had my hand in a lot of different pots," she tells them, as the aroma of sausage-and-egg casseroles, sweet rolls and coffee wafts through the American Legion Post 91. "Policy and budgets and regulations, all that good stuff. So I live my life, love my job, have fun with my kids and get a call one day that says, 'What do you think about running for lieutenant gov?' "

"I was not there at first," she says. But the opportunity to work with a wider range of policy and programs persuaded her. Her own department coordinates 19 other agencies' services for disabled Marylanders. Since she started running, she's broadened her repertoire to include a range of policy issues, from education funding to wraparound social services for students to the intricacies of sewage treatment plant upgrades.

At the same time, she'll readily admit not knowing how to be lieutenant governor -- or governor, for that matter, should that circumstance arise.

"I'll be learning how to do the job," she says after the forum.

As one of her guiding principles, Cox recalls the advice of an instructor at the boot camp she attended nearly a decade ago.

"Sometimes just standing there, hoping the answers are just going to come, doesn't work," she says. "Sometimes you have to walk into unknown territory."

Historical Precedents

If blindness is a hurdle in American politics, it's not an insurmountable one. Thomas Pryor Gore, the maternal grandfather of author Gore Vidal, served as both a U.S. senator and governor for Oklahoma. Minnesota attorney Thomas Schall, who was blinded in an electrical accident, served five terms in the U.S. House and two terms in the Senate. And this year in New York, state Sen. David Paterson, who is legally blind, is running for lieutenant governor with Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Even in her teens, as her eyesight was dimming, Cox was working hard to broaden her experiences.

After her suburban Salt Lake City school district refused to provide her with a magnifying machine at home, she accelerated her studies and left for college a year early. She excelled in her classes and studied abroad in Spain and Japan, learning Portuguese during a missionary stint in Brazil.

After graduating with a degree in educational psychology, she began working full-time for the National Federation of the Blind in Salt Lake City. In 1998, the federation's president offered her a job as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, where she helped push federal legislation that requires public schools to provide Braille textbooks for blind students.

Her husband, whom she met 13 years ago at a motivational seminar in Salt Lake City, says one of her strengths is that she doesn't get distracted or overwhelmed by unfamiliar problems.

"Kris can do many of the things that anyone else can," he says, sitting in the living room of their Baltimore County rowhouse while Tanner and Riley play on the rug. "She may have to do it differently. But she certainly has a level of creativity in thinking outside the box. And she's incredibly capable."

She has developed systems for getting things done. A prolific reader, she uses a computer that translates text into speech to read documents, surf the Web and respond to e-mail. She listens to audio books on her iPod, and often takes notes on a small electronic Braille machine during meetings.

Her mother, Connie Merrill, who divorced and remarried while Kristen was in elementary school, says her daughter never gave up the sports that she played as a girl. She'll kick a soccer ball with a bell in it around the back yard with her boys. She runs (on a treadmill or with a guide), bikes (on a tandem), hikes, takes spinning classes and, next spring, is planning to compete in a triathalon with first lady Kendel Ehrlich.

Ehrlich remembers being surprised, when she first met Cox at a lunch on Capitol Hill several years ago, to learn that she was blind, in part because of her habit of turning her gaze to whomever is speaking.

"She works hard to make her blindness not be the mainstay," Ehrlich says. "It's understandable how it kind of always gets back to that, because I think most people imagine 'How would I handle that?' "

Her selection is a good play for Ehrlich, political analysts say. Before asking her to join the ticket, the governor was sinking in the polls, particularly among suburban women voters. Since then his numbers have improved, though it's difficult to attribute that directly to her. But she softens his image on social welfare issues, says Edward D. Berkowitz, professor of history and public policy at George Washington University. More important, Berkowitz says, it reinforces the idea that he values people who have helped themselves and made their own way in society.

It's a subject she often returns to on the campaign trail.

"Track record is one of the best indicators of future performance," she likes to say before launching into the highlights of Ehrlich's tenure.

"I don't like these mingly things," she says after attending a private fundraiser at the home of a supporter whose pink Mary Kay Cadillac is parked out front. "I'm not a big social person, not a fluffy froufrou."

Even so, she waded into a group of supporters at the event, and addressed them by name throughout the evening after they introduced themselves. At one point, Cox empathized with a businessman in the horseracing industry about the need for slot machines at racetracks. Then she suddenly sounded a different note from the empowered, can-do administrator who spoke at the senior housing project. "It's very difficult to get things done sometimes," she said. "Mike Miller is president of the Senate. He basically told the governor when he took office: 'We'll work with you for three years. The last year we'll make your life absolutely impossible.' And I think that has happened, and it's bad policy."

The group clapped energetically, and then Cox made her exit, sinking with relief into the back seat of the Yukon for the long ride home.

Self-Sufficient Ways

One of the things Cox has learned to deal with is the assumptions that people make about her. Oftentimes, crowds part to let her through. At a recent campaign event, a man tried to take her by the elbow to guide her to a podium.

At moments like this, she thinks about what to say, weighs whether to say anything at all. It's not that she's ungrateful, but this is just not what she needs.

At yet another meet-and-greet, she tucks her elbow into her side, steps to the front of the room and introduces herself.

"I'm not here to say I'm going to solve all your problems, because we probably can't," she says. "What I like to talk about is empowering people."

"Get out of your comfort zone," she says. "Be brave."

Staff writer David Montgomery contributed to this report.