National
Journal Group
Learn more about our publications and sign up for a free trial.
E-Mail Alerts
Get notified the moment your favorite features are updated.
Need A Reprint?
Click here for details on reprints, permissions and back issues.
Advertise With Us
Details on advertising with National Journal Group -- both online and in print -- can be found in our online media kit.
Go Wireless
Get daily political updates on your handheld computer.
|
Last Updated June 22, 2005
Barbara Boxer, California's junior senator, was first elected in 1992 and reelected in 1998. She grew up in Brooklyn, where she was a victim of sexual harassment by a college professor and was refused work as a stockbroker. She and her husband moved to San Francisco in 1965 and then, in search of affordable housing, to Marin County in 1968. In 1968 she volunteered for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign; in 1970 she and some neighbors formed the Marin Alternative, to oppose the Vietnam War and a subdivision planned for a wetland near Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Marin County was only on its way to being trendy then; the overall political tone was liberal Republican, but heading left: it was one of the few parts of the country where George McGovern won a higher percentage in 1972 than Hubert Humphrey had in 1968 and where abortion rights supporter Gerald Ford got a larger percentage margin over abortion critic Jimmy Carter in 1976 than Richard Nixon had over McGovern; in contrast, Marin voted 73%-25% for John Kerry in 2004. In 1972 Boxer ran for the Board of Supervisors and lost to an incumbent Republican. She then worked for Democratic Congressman John Burton. In 1976, when women candidates were more accepted, she ran again for the board and won. When Burton retired unexpectedly in 1982, she ran for the House and was easily elected. She made many splashes in the House, unearthing the Air Force's $7,622 coffee pot in 1984, denouncing the Gulf war with more ardor than just about anyone and leading a march of women on the Senate when Anita Hill was testifying against Clarence Thomas. In the 1980s it seemed improbable that anyone as liberal as Boxer could be elected senator from California, which had after all voted Republican for president in all but one election from 1952 to 1988. But now Boxer has been elected three times, by decisive and rising margins. In 1992 she started off as neither the best-known nor the best-financed candidate, but this turned out to be the year of the woman, in which the enthusiasm of the feminist left produced important victories for Democratic women. Boxer won the June 1992 Democratic primary with 44% of the vote, to 31% for Lieutenant Governor Leo McCarthy, and 22% for Congressman Mel Levine. Her general election opponent was Bruce Herschensohn, a Los Angeles TV and radio commentator, backer of a flat tax and offshore oil drilling and opponent of abortion. Herschensohn had edged Silicon Valley moderate Congressman Tom Campbell 38%-36% in the primary, with the help of then-Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono, who won 17%. The Boxer-Herschensohn race was a battle of opposites, the far left versus the far right of the American electoral spectrum. Boxer was helped by the collapse of the Bush candidacy in California, by hearty support from Feinstein and by the revelation by state Democratic political director Bob Mulholland during the last week of the campaign that Herschensohn attended nightclubs that featured nude dancers. Boxer's voting record has been strongly liberal, among the most liberal in the Senate in National Journal's ratings. She is perhaps the personification of the feminist left, and is one of the strongest proponents of abortion rights in the Senate; she has vehemently opposed the partial-birth abortion ban. But she was also a staunch defender of Bill Clinton. In 1998, the senator who had marched across the Capitol to protest the cross-examination of Anita Hill, found little to believe in the charges against Clinton until he admitted their truth, and even then limited her condemnation to a perfunctory statement combined with a total commitment to defeat impeachment. And in 1999 the crusader against the Gulf War resolution solidly backed the bombing campaign against Serbia. In September 2001 she supported the use of force in Afghanistan. But in October 2002 she voted against the use of force in Iraq, and she voted against the $87 billion supplemental appropriation in October 2003. She has often charged that the Bush administration diverted its attention from Al Qaeda to Iraq. But she supported the act denouncing Syria in November 2003. "We don't want to go to war with Syria. We just want to say in a truthful way, 'These are things that you've been doing wrong. Please meet these markers.'" Boxer has supported gun control and has sponsored amendments to require childproof safety locks on all handguns and to ban sales of guns to people who are intoxicated. But in summer 2002 she and Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning emerged as the Senate's leading advocates of allowing airline pilots to carry guns. Boxer argued that pilots could be trusted with that responsibility and that they could protect passengers against terrorists. The measure was initially opposed by the Bush administration but, after the House passed it, it passed the Senate by a wide margin. In April 2004 Boxer and Bunning charged that the TSA was stalling on implementation and urged it be speeded up. "TSA has slow-walked the program from day one, denying thousands of pilots their right to be trained in this program and denying the American people the additional security they deserve." Also in 2003 Boxer warned of the danger to airliners from shoulder-fired missiles and called for installation of anti-missile devices on all airliners and beefed up Coast Guard and National Guard patrolling in airport perimeters. She co-sponsored a bill passed by the Commerce committee in 2004 to provide $500 million for rail and mass transit safety. She has opposed the partial-birth abortion ban and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In January 2004 she called for testing of all cows slaughtered in the U.S. to prevent an outbreak of mad cow disease. Boxer was frustrated when Republicans during the Clinton years held up nominations to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, currently the most liberal in the country. In spring 2001 she opposed the nomination of Orange County Congressman Christopher Cox to the Ninth Circuit; when Dianne Feinstein said she might oppose him too, Cox withdrew. She and Feinstein worked to set up a procedure to give them approval of all federal district judges in California. Boxer has weighed in on all manner of California issues. As California was hit by rolling electricity blackouts in early 2001, she proposed a windfall profits tax on energy producers and, with Feinstein, sponsored a bill to impose temporary price controls on wholesale electric power suppliers. But she split with Feinstein by backing the two Oregon senators' unsuccessful amendment to the bankruptcy reform bill that would have barred PG&E and Southern California Edison from discharging their debts in bankruptcy; a few weeks later PG&E sought bankruptcy protection. She and Anna Eshoo sponsored similar bills to require FERC to order refunds of up to $9 billion to California consumers. In 2004 she called for the resignation of FERC members who refused to order immediate refunds. She has joined Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden in his attacks on FTC members who have not taken action against West Coast gasoline price increases which they said were the result of oil company mergers. She criticized the Bush administration for opposing $10 million in funding for preserving California's 21 Franciscan missions built between 1769 and 1823. In June 2001, when Jesse Helms amended the education bill to bar funds for school districts that exclude the Boy Scouts, she successfully pressed a substitute which requires equal access to all youth groups; this would allow San Francisco and other California districts to keep excluding the Boy Scouts, which ban gays from the organization. When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was performing same-sex marriages in February 2004, she avoided endorsing his acts and said, "I have always been very strongly for domestic partnerships. I think the California law is a very good, workable law." She joined with Dianne Feinstein in May 2004 in calling for federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for a defendant accused of killing a San Francisco police officer with an AK-47; San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, whom Boxer had supported, had declined to seek the death penalty. During her first three years in the Senate Boxer's job ratings were among the Senate's lowest. But California with its large metro areas trended sharply toward the Democrats in the mid-1990s, and in early 1997 Boxer's job rating was up to 50%. Prominent Republicans--Congressman Tom Campbell, San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, 1994 Senate nominee Michael Huffington--decided not to run against her in 1998. In the all-party primary, state Treasurer Matt Fong edged businessman (and now Congressman) Darrell Issa. On paper Fong was a strong candidate, with an Asian heritage and a moderate record on issues; his mother March Fong Eu, a Democrat, was California's secretary of state from 1974 to 1994. But Boxer raised $15 million and campaigned long and hard. She launched an ad campaign attacking Fong for his ambiguous stances on issues like abortion. She guarded herself from contact with reporters so she would not have to answer questions about Bill Clinton; the president's brother-in-law Tony Rodham was then married to her daughter Nicole. Fong attacked her for the hypocrisy of her stand on the Clinton scandals. But he spoke hesitantly and unconvincingly in the sound bites that are the staple of California politics and never succeeded in raising much money. For much of September and October he was off the air, while Boxer was pounding the airwaves mercilessly. Boxer won 53%-43%. She won 61% of the vote in Los Angeles County and 63% in the San Francisco Bay area, and trailed not far behind in Southern California and the rest of the state--an impressive performance for a Democrat dismissed a few years before as too left wing for much of the state. Boxer says that before September 11 she had decided not to seek a third term in 2004. But when House Majority Leader Tom DeLay six months after the attacks criticized Democrats for criticizing the Bush administration, she changed her mind. "Then I got really fearful for my country. The greatest thing about our country is that we're free and that we debate and we talk." She began raising impressive amounts of money, and once again many well-known Republicans declined to make the race. The best-known candidate against her, Bill Jones, had been elected secretary of state by narrow margins in 1994 and 1998; but he was not well known outside his home base in Fresno County. He had the endorsement but not the active support of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nonetheless he won the March 2004 primary with 45% of the vote, to 20% for former U.S. Treasurer Rosario Marin and 11% for former Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian; Marin made a close race of it in Los Angeles County and Southern California, but Jones won by wide margins in the rest of the state. This turned out not to be a seriously contested race. George W. Bush's political advisers may still have been miffed that Jones in 2000 retracted his primary endorsement of Bush and endorsed John McCain; in any case, national Republicans made no effort to pump in the huge amounts of money needed to make a California Republican competitive. Boxer spent $16 million to Jones's $7 million; Boxer ran no attack ads, as she had done in 1998, while Jones ran no TV ads at all in September and October. Boxer, elected with 48% of the vote in 1992 and 53% in 1998, won 58% in 2004--almost a perfect arithmetical progression upward. Jones won only 38%. Boxer won 67% of the vote in Los Angeles County and 70% in the San Francisco Bay area; she ran narrowly ahead in Southern California and almost precisely even in the rest of the state. Running in a presidential year, she won 6,955,000 votes--more popular votes than any other senator had ever won in American history, far ahead of Dianne Feinstein's previous records set in 1992 and 2000. Boxer seems to have taken this huge victory in the nation's largest state as a mandate to speak out. In January 2005, as the electoral vote count was read out to a joint session of Congress, she was the one senator to protest the award of Ohio's electoral votes to George W. Bush. She remembered that four years before no senator had protested the Florida vote even though several members of the House had, and she said she regretted not having protested then. Her protest triggered the dissolution of the joint session and a debate in each of the two Houses--for one hour in the Senate, rather longer in the House. The Senate voted 74-1 to accept the Ohio count, with Boxer was the one dissenter; the House voted 267-31 on the same question. "I hate inconveniencing my friends, but I think it's worth a couple of hours to shine some light on these issues," Boxer said. Later in January, after her California colleague Dianne Feinstein escorted Condoleezza Rice to the Foreign Relations Committee hearing on her nomination to be secretary of state, Boxer attacked Rice stingingly. Her "loyalty to the mission," Boxer said, "overwhelmed your respect for the truth." Speaking of the troops, she said, "You sent them in there because of weapons of mass destruction. Later the mission changed when there were none." Rice responded, "I really hope you will refrain from impugning my integrity. I really hope that you will not imply that I take the truth lightly." In these exchanges Boxer seemed to emerge as the most aggressive and articulate challenger of the Bush administration in the Senate.
Committees
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NEW FEATURE
[ Site Index | Staff | Privacy Policy | E-Mail Alerts ]
[ Reprints And Back Issues | Content Licensing ]
[ Make NationalJournal.com Your Homepage ]
[ About National Journal Group Inc. ]
[ Employment Opportunities ]
Copyright 2013 by National Journal Group Inc.
The Watergate · 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-739-8400 · fax 202-833-8069
NationalJournal.com is an Atlantic Media publication.
