Boxer takes center stage

January 25, 2005

By David Whitney
The Sacramento Bee

Just a few weeks into the new congressional session, many are beginning to wonder aloud: "What's up with Barbara Boxer?"

The first week of the session, Boxer led the Senate challenge over certification of the Ohio presidential vote, citing irregularities.

In the end, it was she alone standing against certification, with 74 of her colleagues -- including Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and 33 other Democrats -- favoring the count.

And last week, Boxer was all over Condoleezza Rice at her confirmation hearing to be President Bush's new secretary of state. Boxer all but called Rice a liar over her statements leading up to the war in Iraq as Bush's national security adviser.

Repeatedly, Rice appealed to Boxer to turn down the attacks.

"We can have this discussion in any way that you would like," Rice said. "But I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity."

Boxer never relented, and she and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democrats' nominee against Bush in November, cast the only votes against sending Rice's nomination to the Senate floor.

Boxer said in an interview last week that she is not the new diva of demagoguery.

"I was just doing my job, like I've always done it before," she said.

But rarely has Boxer made so many headlines so quickly in a congressional session and in fights against such overwhelming odds.

Many see in this a skilled politician, freed however temporarily from election worries of her own, rising up as the leading voice of Democrats who believe Bush should be challenged in every step of his second term as president.

Boxer was elected in November with 57.8 percent of the vote, collecting a million more votes than Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein garnered in her 2000 re-election as the state's senior senator. Boxer's office said the 6.9 million votes she received are the most any senator in any state has ever received.

Boxer is now gaining steadily as the voice of unyielding Democratic opposition.

"This allows Barbara Boxer to carve out a forum for herself among the liberals in the Senate," said Claremont College political scientist Sherry Bebitch Jeffe.

"Could she be positioning herself to become what Ted Kennedy is now _ the voice of the liberal wing within the Democratic Party?" she asked. "She's got a lot of time. She's got six more years to develop that."

Bruce Cain, head of the Institute for Government Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said California Democrats have a tremendous appetite for what Boxer has to offer on the national stage.

"There are a lot of Democrats who think Ohio was a fraud," he said. "There is no scientific evidence for it as far as we can tell, but they just believe it in their hearts. We've seen that these people have money, and they get organized, and so you can't just ignore the progressive wing of the party."

This is a role for which Boxer is well suited and which she has played many times before, Cain said. But that part of the Boxer persona has not been in evidence in recent years because of the demands of electoral politics.

"After her initial election (in 1992), there was a lot of speculation about whether she would be a one-shot senator," he said. But Cain said that by steering clear of major controversies, particularly in the last couple of years, "she wasn't giving Republicans anything to run against."

Indeed, since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, Boxer was a strong voice for improving national security and intelligence gathering. She has been a leading advocate for equipping civilian aircraft to defeat shoulder-fired missiles and voted for the Patriot Act.

Barbara Sinclair, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that as long as the Democratic Party dominates in California elections, Boxer is well suited to serve as the political counterpoint for a huge slice of them.

"There is a sense among a lot of Democrats that it is very important not to give Bush a free ride, at any point," she said.

In the interview, Boxer said she doesn't believe her November election margin changes anything, except to give her another Senate term that, as it happens, won't end until two years after Bush is out of office.

"I don't believe in mandates," she said.

"But what I do believe in is keeping promises to the people," she said. "I told them election night -- and I didn't know how prophetic this was -- that if I had to stand alone, I will do it. I am not afraid."

http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/opinions/story/2042590p-10093565c.html