Issue date: January 12, 2000
He'll be 35, and he's got $1,000
By BARBARA WOOD
Tom Koos is going to be 35 -- the minimum age to be American president -- in November, one day before the presidential election, so he's decided to do the only logical thing -- run for the office.
Mr. Koos, who works at Stanford University as a "Regulatory Compliance Specialist" and also as a live-in property manager on a Woodside estate, will appear on the New Hampshire primary ballot as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. All it took was $1,000 and filling out a few forms.
In the week before the February 1 primary he'll be there in New Hampshire, along with Al Gore, Bill Bradley, John McCain, George W. Bush and many of the other 25 people on the ballot, speaking at candidate's forums and knocking on doors ("if it isn't too cold," he says).
Mr. Koos has never run for office before, although he says he came mighty close to a seat on the Woodside Town Council in 1999. He filled out an application for the position, but arrived at Town Hall on the last day for filing 21 minutes after the doors had closed. If he'd arrived while the offices were still open, he'd have been the only candidate and pretty much assured the office.
Since there weren't any candidates, however, the town extended the filing deadline. Sue Boynton applied and Mr. Koos' wife, Dawn Banghart, convinced him she'd like to see him at home a little more often, so he didn't file.
He does serve on the town's Bicycle Committee, on the board of the Kings Mountain Water Company (he and his wife own a house in the Kings Mountain area) and on the City and County Association of Governments (CCAG) bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee.
While Mr. Koos doesn't have any delusions about actually winning the Democratic nomination, he is running a serious, if low-key, campaign. He has a Web site -- tomkoos.com -- with a list of his campaign stands. He's got a four-color brochure, and is getting refrigerator magnets made.
Mr. Koos supports public campaign financing, a better-paid and better-trained military, increasing the cap on the amount of salary subject to Social Security tax, spending any budget surplus on reducing the national debt, letting women make their own choice on abortion, and allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military.
"A lot of this process is just thinking about what is really important," Mr. Koos says. He also says he thinks he's going to be paying a lot more attention to the candidates, having been one himself.
"Once you're involved in something like this, you listen more carefully," Mr. Koos says.
His campaign staff is rather sparse. "I'm having a hard time convincing even my wife to give me a hand, right now," he says.
But he's gotten lots of interest in his campaign from friends and family, and that's one reason why he says he's running.
"Now that I can say I'm running for president, people open up, they tell me of their concerns, their hopes," he says in his Web page statement.
He's had a number of people who say they never vote promise him that they will vote this year, he says.
"Everyone says, I'd vote for you if I lived in New Hampshire," Mr. Koos says.
New Hampshire is the only ballot Mr. Koos will appear on because other states have more stringent filing requirements. In four more years, however, Mr. Koos says he hopes he can qualify to run in more states.
"I'd like to make this a quadrennial thing," he says.
"There's a lot of personal satisfaction in kind of pushing me into the complete unknown."
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