Boxer Prepares for Tough Battle in ’98

To the assembled workers and executives at the sprawling Northrop-Grumman plant in El Segundo, Sen. Barbara Boxer was seen as something of a hero.

She was warmly introduced by company bigwigs and praised by federal and local officials for her hard work in pushing the defense contractor’s latest federal project.

Instead of a high-tech jet fighter to wreak terror on despots abroad, the roll-out ceremony featured a newfangled bus, highlighting how aerospace technology can be harnessed for peaceable urban needs.

For Boxer, the heavily produced media event was rife with irony. Once regarded--during her pugnacious 10 years as a member of the House--as one of the most outspoken foes of defense spending, she now counts California defense contractors among her supporters.

She will need them.

Although her Senate term doesn’t expire for another two years, Boxer has embarked on a difficult political journey.

One of the Democratic Party’s quintessential activists, Boxer, who lives in Greenbrae in the Bay Area, has Republicans salivating at the prospect of running against her in 1998. Her liberal credentials as a leader on feminist causes and a staunch defender of abortion rights makes her one of the country’s most inviting incumbents for dethronement by the GOP.

“This will be the toughest race of my life,” Boxer said. “Both parties will really fight for the seat,” she said. “. . . . It will be a nationally targeted race.”

The upcoming electoral struggle will be a juggling act as she tries to appeal to more centrist voters while retaining her traditional liberal base.

Not surprisingly, Boxer sees her enthusiastic support of Northrop-Grumman’s “stealth” bus as a perfect example of how she has modulated her views.

Instead of lambasting the military for buying $7,000 coffeepots and decrying bloated defense budgets, Boxer prefers to be known these days as the champion of defense-conversion programs and defender of California’s embattled military bases.

But during a swing of speeches and fund-raisers in Southern California last month, Boxer got a taste of the reelection battle to come.

Despite her improved standing with some grateful defense contractor executives, Boxer continues to evoke strong negative feelings over her reputation as a bombastic liberal.

A few protesters with placards pleading “Boxer Go Home” paraded outside a Seal Beach retirement community where the senator was due to speak.

In Republican-dominated Newport Beach, a picketer greeted her outside a fund-raiser for a local Democrat on a quixotic quest for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But in Santa Monica, Boxer spent an evening basking in praise from a roomful of Westside Democrats for being a fighter for women, minorities and a more humane federal government.

As one wearying election season winds down for many, Boxer’s long march to a second term is just beginning.

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Boxer’s 1992 race for the Senate was supposed to be the one she could not win.

Faced with a tough field of better-known and better-financed Democrats, she campaigned aggressively and won the primary by 13 percentage points over runner-up Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy.

She drew conservative TV commentator Bruce Herschensohn as her Republican challenger and hung on to beat him by five percentage points after depicting him as a right-wing extremist.

She was aided by the “Year of the Woman” electoral wave that at the same time helped carry California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the Senate. Feinstein was elected to fill out the last two years of Gov. Pete Wilson’s Senate term. “The pundits say I was a fluke,” Boxer says en route to the fund-raiser in Newport Beach. “But I have a record to run on, a vision for the future and a great story to tell.”

Part of that story will be touting what she’s done for California during her Senate term.

In the first two years of her term, when Democrats held the majority, Boxer focused on reusing shuttered military bases and on defense-conversion programs for the state’s battered aerospace and defense contractors.

In the minority the last two years, she has continued to stymie the low-level nuclear dump planned for Ward Valley in the Mojave Desert; turned back an effort to repeal her bill that calls for “dolphin-safe” labeling on tuna cans; shepherded a law to set up a trust fund to preserve the Presidio, a former Army base, in San Francisco; and helped to correct an earlier law that had inadvertently banned certain cruise ships from plying California ports.

She has also made sure that the Alameda Corridor project got the transportation funds it needed--and goaded the Senate to act in the ethics case against then-Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.).

Another part of her story will be what she plans to do in the next two years and--she hopes--the six after that.

“My focus will be on economic, environmental and children’s issues,” she says, sounding themes that President Clinton has used to appeal to a wide swath of voters in both parties.

Boxer said she will fashion a legislative plan that includes tougher environmental regulations on toxic materials near schools, a push for computers in school classrooms, a ban on “junk” guns, and laws to protect workers’ pension plans from going broke.

She will mount an admittedly difficult crusade to make a woman’s freedom to choose abortion based on a law, not a court ruling, and to seek more funds for health research and more attention to domestic violence.

To appear more senatorial, Boxer no longer wants to be perceived as the ideologue she was in her House days. But for many, she will always be an icon of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

A recent Times poll shows that Boxer may have other concerns--namely, as a senator, she inspires tepid responses.

When a sampling of registered voters was asked about impressions of Boxer, 37% said favorable, 32% said unfavorable, 28% did not know enough about her to say and 3% had no opinion.

The poll found a gender gap--36% of men had an unfavorable impression of Boxer, compared with 28% of women. In a lesser gap, 38% of women had a favorable impression of Boxer, compared with 36% of men. A surprising 34% of women polled had no opinion of her, compared with 28% of men.

The poll also found that only 29% believed she deserved to be reelected to the Senate, while 48% said someone else should be given the chance. Twenty-three percent had no opinion.

With the election two years down the road--an eternity in politics--Boxer has plenty of time to enhance her public standing. But one aspect of Boxer’s persona stands little chance of changing.

“The attack ads will call me an old-fashioned liberal,” says Boxer, foreseeing the TV spots that Republicans will use against her.

Not that any of her GOP friends are holding their tongues until then.

During his failed GOP presidential campaign Bob Dole “said his first priority is to eliminate Barbara Boxer,” Boxer says as her sedan speeds down the San Diego Freeway during her recent visit to Southern California. “[Gov. Pete] Wilson said the three most frightening words to him were ‘Senator Barbara Boxer.’ ”

Boxer munches on a banana. “I’m underestimated,” she says.

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At the Balboa Bay Club on Pacific Coast Highway, Orange County Democrats were hosting a fund-raising lunch for Sally Alexander, the energetic 82-year-old whose campaign against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) would come up predictably short.

It’s almost dessert time as Boxer arrives. She is introduced by Chauncey Alexander, the candidate’s husband, as “the finest example of what is right in American politics.” The crowd, reveling in its underdog status in this Republican Orange County bastion, roars in appreciation for the diminutive senator with the don’t-mess-with-me persona.

Boxer delivers a short, punchy introductory speech. Sally Alexander calls Rohrabacher “Rohr-backwards.” Much is made of the photograph of Alexander in a wetsuit (“I look better than Dana,” she says). Then there’s an outbreak of the “Macarena,” which Boxer is clearly doing for the first time.

“I didn’t have time to learn at the convention,” she says.

Outside, a lone protester has written on a placard: “Clinton and Boxer = Two Liberals.”

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The crowd at Seal Beach Leisure World, about 200 strong, wants some answers. Dozens of questions on three-by-five cards have been sent to the front. But the attentive seniors will have to wait as Boxer delivers a dose of partisan speechifying. “If Democrats hurt seniors, hurt children, hurt the environment, we don’t deserve your support,” she says.

The applause is respectful and restrained as latecomers carefully take their folding-chair seats.

The first question, surprisingly, is on flag desecration, not Medicare. Boxer tells the seniors that she opposes a constitutional amendment but would support a statute making such behavior a crime.

She works through questions on saving the redwoods (in favor), protecting wetlands (in favor) and the separation of church and state (in favor).

She catches heck for taking so long to answer her mail but says her Washington office receives the highest volume of mail in the Senate--10,000 pieces a day.

As for building more prisons versus supporting education and training programs, Boxer walks a classic middle course.

“In the long run, family and education is the answer, but I’m willing to throw the book at criminals when they hurt society.” The line gets the biggest crowd reaction.

Filing out, some say: “She was good” and “She answered our questions.”

“She seems OK to me,” says Lynne Herman, one of the few who offered her name. “But I don’t know much about her.”

“Boxer Go Home,” “Mediscare Not Fair,” “Trust Dole,” say the protesters’ signs.

Boxer slides out of sight as her car pulls away.

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The sleek contemporary Santa Monica home of Susan Adelman is Boxer country. “We told the architect we wanted it to flow because we wanted to hold events here,” Adelman says.

The event in question is a fund-raiser for Gerrie Schipske, a Democrat who would go on to narrowly lose her bid for the state Assembly from Long Beach. It is here, amid the informed chitchat and crudites, that Boxer is wholly in her element.

Santa Monica Assemblywoman Sheila J. Kuehl introduces Boxer glowingly. “She is a very, very important person to have in Congress for California, to fight for the constituencies that we care for.”

The assembled Democrats nod in agreement.

Lucie Bava, a coordinator for Women For:, a political action committee that supports women’s issues, praises Boxer for “being tenacious, a straight shooter and a supporter of the human side of politics.”

Lawyer Roger Kohn finds her “to be more sensitive, more caring for people and the government’s safety net.”

The high-ceilinged living room throbs with political bonhomie. A pair of “Boxer” shorts is raffled for $150. Boxer’s 1994 book, “Stranger in the Senate”--inscribed, of course--goes for $190.

It’s too late in the evening for protesters.

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Boxer is heading back to the Beverly Hilton hotel.

“You can put any label you want on me: liberal, fighter, tough. Voters respond to politicians who like to lead, take tough votes, don’t waffle. That’s what I am.”

She says her staff sometimes squirms when she takes a controversial position.

“I tell them one-third of the people will agree with you, one-third will disagree and one-third won’t have a position.”

Boxer has two years to work on that last third.