From Activism Grew a Liberal Voice in Senate

GREENBRAE, Calif. —  Barbara Boxer’s people live these days in genteel comfort here at the eastern edge of Mt. Tamalpais State Park, their homes tucked beneath swaying trees amid cascading red bougainvillea and the occasional rose bed.

There’s Tom Thorner, Jackie DeNevers and Nancy Hakim, Boxer herself and her husband, Stewart. They all became friends 35 years ago when they formed the Marin Alternative to tackle issues distant -- the Vietnam War -- and as close as the valley floor along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, where they squelched a developer’s dream of turning a wetland into a neighborhood.

Boxer was a young mother then, a native New Yorker and former stockbroker who moved west with her lawyer husband to find a future. Opposition to the war propelled her into activism -- she was a volunteer in Democrat Eugene McCarthy’s failed 1968 presidential run -- but it was local environmental battles that gave Boxer her first tastes of political victory, her first proof that if you agitate and cajole enough, sometimes you can change your corner of the world.

Boxer has used that mix and an attention to grass-roots organizing to propel a nearly 30-year career in elected office -- the last 12 in the U.S. Senate, where she has been both a beacon and a lightning rod for liberal causes.

From the beginning, Boxer has positioned herself not only as an environmental steward but as a leader and a product of women’s rights.

As Boxer, 63, faces reelection to the Senate this November, she jokes on the campaign trail that her name fits her politics -- she’s a fighter more than a conciliator in a Senate chamber in which conciliation is equated with progress.

“You don’t want her on the other side,” Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) told some of Boxer’s constituents during a visit to the Capitol this summer.

Thorner sees a fighter, too. He witnessed Boxer’s first steps into politics more than 30 years ago and believes just as fervently now as he did then in those galvanizing issues: peace, the environment and sustainable growth. And he has retained his faith in Boxer, too, as have many of the others responsible a generation ago for Marin County’s metamorphosis from rural Republican enclave to a place where liberalism has not since gone out of style.

“I know a lot of politicians, and so many of them are interested in the money or the power,” said Thorner, a lawyer who runs a venture capital fund in nearby Larkspur. “She’s interested in doing what she believes is the right thing.”

In politics, though, the definition of what’s right can be slippery, and it is becoming the core question in Boxer’s attempt for a third term in the Senate.

Boxer’s political perspective is decidedly liberal. Amid the patriotic fervor after the Sept. 11 attacks, Boxer was one of the few to stand firmly against the war in Iraq, even as she joined 97 other senators in voting for the controversial Patriot Act.

Boxer at the time disliked several provisions of the bill but voted for the measure in hopes of later amending what she saw as its shortcomings, such as allowing federal investigators access to library and bookstore records.

Her opponent, Bill Jones, a former California assemblyman and secretary of state, has based his campaign on the belief that Boxer’s positions have made her an ineffective senator, one who emphasizes issues like abortion and the environment over national defense and who was unable to get colleagues to support her measures even when the Democrats held a majority.

To some analysts, Boxer’s record bears out that critique. Although Boxer has scored on such legislative successes as after-school child-care programs and key environmental laws, her overall role is “part of the stalwart group of vocal liberals” led by Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, according to Ross Baker, a Rutgers University professor who studies Congress.

She drew national attention in the House by blasting Pentagon procurement after finding $7,600 coffeepots and $600 toilet seat covers in the Defense Department budget, but the bulk of her legislative work has been nibbling away at her core issues and enjoying her status as an agitator willing to lose a vote rather than compromise a principle.

“She occupies a niche in the Senate, and I think her main contribution tends to be much more rhetorical,” Baker said. “She’s a good arguer, and she doesn’t mind taking people on in a debate. But I don’t think she’s regarded as one of the real heavyweights. Even Ted Kennedy reaches across party lines easily, and [California Sen. Dianne] Feinstein does, too. I think it’s harder for Boxer.”

Part of it is personality.

“Her style and so on are so combatively liberal, and there’s a certain amount of theatrics to it,” Baker said. “She is maybe a little too serious about it, which makes it harder to establish those bipartisan connections.”

Boxer’s defenders say she approaches the job from an activist’s perspective. That pugnaciousness is the charm: Better to cast a principled vote in a losing cause than to compromise your beliefs.

“Whether you’re going to win doesn’t matter,” said Marco Gonzalez, former chairman of the Surfrider environmental group, as he noshed at a Boxer fundraiser in San Diego this summer. “Why compromise just because the legislation is going to go through? We see that as a sign of a champion.”

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Boxer’s first run for public office fell short.

It was 1972, Richard Nixon swamped George McGovern in the presidential race, Ronald Reagan was in the California governor’s office and, despite the growing influence of the women’s liberation movement, voters in the Marin County Board of Supervisors district where Boxer was running weren’t ready to back a young Democratic mother over the incumbent, an established Republican businessman.

“People would write letters to the editor: ‘How could a woman do this with a young family?’ ” Boxer said recently over a breakfast of rye toast and eggs at a diner near the Capitol. “My next-door neighbor told me that. She said, ‘I love you, but I couldn’t vote for you. It wouldn’t be right.’ Why? ‘Because you have the kids.’ Meanwhile, she was a divorced mother of two kids who was working full time.”

Four years later, the political tables turned, and Boxer beat the same incumbent, Peter Arrigoni, in large part by rallying politically marginalized women.

Boxer had found her formula, and she hasn’t lost a race since -- campaigns heavily financed with checks from women from nearly every state in the country who view Boxer as a national standard-bearer for women’s causes.

“Her campaign was definitely women-power, and it was exciting -- there were so many young women like myself who had never been politically active but were pulled in and became players,” said Jackie DeNevers, who met Boxer during the 1972 campaign, joined her 1976 campaign and became a Boxer aide for the next two decades.

Boxer didn’t run as a feminist. Her first campaign statement, published in the Marin Alternative Voice newsletter she helped edit, has a timeless tone to it.

“It is not too late to save Marin from being inundated under the waves of ‘progress’ and pollution rolling in our direction,” Boxer said, after accusing the incumbent of lacking the “imagination and effectiveness” to do anything about it. “We must stop the bulldozers which are reshaping what centuries have created. There is not much time left.”

Gender helped create the critical mass that led to Boxer’s early success. Had Stewart Boxer, a lawyer and chairman of the Marin County Human Rights Commission, been the candidate, DeNevers said, Boxer’s political base -- including fellow PTA moms and antiwar activists -- likely would not have come together.

“It was a different time, and most women were not working,” DeNevers said from her living room overlooking a tree-lined ravine a few streets from the Boxers’ home. “The women came to the campaign because that’s what they could do at that point.”

Boxer was born in 1940 and grew up in Brooklyn, where her mother urged her to learn typing and stenography so she could find a job should her future husband leave her. As a teenager, Boxer became co-head of her high school’s cheering squad. “That was my first election,” she said.

She studied economics at Brooklyn College, married within days of graduating and pursued a career on Wall Street, another male bastion. Boxer stayed out of politics in those days, except for organizing a tenants’ petition drive to force their recalcitrant landlord to finish renovations to their building’s lobby.

The Boxers moved to San Francisco in 1965 after falling in love with the city while visiting relatives, and in 1968, the young family, priced out of the San Francisco housing market, moved to the comfortable cedar-sided house here in Greenbrae that they still call home.

Boxer wrote in her 1994 political memoir, “Stranger in the Senate,” that the November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy sparked a political awakening that was completed by the April 1968 murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and, two months later, of Robert F. Kennedy, which she watched unfold on television as her husband drove a baby-sitter home.

“Looking back on it, I had two choices,” Boxer wrote. “I could either psychologically withdraw into a 1950s-type bomb shelter and put the family into it, protected from the pain, or reach out and try to change things.”

In San Francisco, where passions over the war, the environment and women’s rights burned with a particular intensity, Boxer caught fire.

“Suddenly, I was looking around and saying, ‘What kind of world are my kids growing up in?’ ” Boxer said. “I just changed so dramatically.”

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In 1970, Bill Jones, the son of a successful Central Valley rancher, was enjoying his first taste of politics by winning election as president of the Fresno State student government. About 200 miles to the northwest, Boxer was already an activist.

She and her husband had immersed themselves in a growing network of progressive activists that put Marin County on record in November 1970 against the Vietnam War with a successful nonbinding resolution demanding that President Nixon bring the troops home.

“It was a Republican county then, so it was a big thing that it passed,” Boxer said. “We were so happy.”

The activists were also part of a statewide push that year for environmental protection laws that gave rise to the California Environmental Quality Act.

Emboldened by those successes, Boxer and her political allies came together as Marin Alternative in December 1970.

Over the next few years, they defeated plans for a pipeline to bring water to Marin from the Russian River in Sonoma County and joined successful battles against developing in local wetlands.

“People really care about the environment in our state, and I think that was the beginning of it,” Boxer said of those early political battles. “I’m so excited looking back at all those things I worked on because they are the same things I work on today: the environment, equal rights for women.”

Boxer’s efforts first in the House of Representatives and now the Senate have established her as one of Congress’ most persistent voices on those issues.

As a member of Congress, she was part of a group of seven women that marched to the Senate to demand that Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas be heard.

Boxer won her Senate seat in November 1992, in a “year of the women” election that also sent Feinstein to the Senate, replacing John Seymour, who had been appointed to the seat given up by Pete Wilson when he was elected governor.

In some ways, Boxer’s election history has sailed on the winds of luck. She won her congressional seat after her former boss, John Burton, supported her to replace him when he decided not to seek reelection in 1982.

Boxer’s first race for the Senate in 1992 was sealed after last-minute revelations by Democratic activist Bob Mulholland of strip-joint visits by Republican Bruce Herschensohn, who until then had been backed by conservative “family values” organizations.

In her last race six years ago, Boxer jumped first and painted challenger Matt Fong as an arch-conservative, an image he was unable to shake. She embraced a similar tactic this time out against Jones, describing him as “so far to the right even the Republicans will disagree with him.”

Boxer has survived scandal too. In 1991-92, dozens of House members were found to have passed bad personal checks at the House bank. Boxer bounced 143 checks totaling $41,417, an embarrassment for a legislator criticizing the Pentagon for wasteful spending. But she won her first Senate race just a few months later.

It’s a long way from the West Coast to Washington, D.C., but Boxer travels it two or three weekends a month. To let senators get home and back, the Senate calendar rarely includes votes on Mondays or Fridays, which means most of the work gets crammed into three hectic and long days.

During the week, Boxer lives in Washington with her daughter, Nicole, and grandson in a two-story brick row house with a very Bay Area-looking purple door a short distance from the Capitol.

The day begins about 8:30 a.m., when a staffer drops off the “briefing folder” of the day’s speeches, press releases and other papers mapping out the legislative day.

Her work often stretches into the night, a relentless series of 12-hour days that led Boxer to decide a few years ago that her second term would be it. She was in her 60s, had spent 20 years of weekdays apart from her husband, an Oakland lawyer, and that was more than enough.

But terrorism and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay changed her mind.

Boxer was in the Capitol building as the first jetliner crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. She remembers standing next to Sen. John F. Kerry watching news reports when the second plane hit, and the confusion began to turn into understanding. “That’s terrorism,” Kerry said, pointing at the television.

They watched the Pentagon burn across the Potomac River and didn’t learn until later that a fourth plane that had nose-dived into a Pennsylvania field might have been heading for the Capitol.

Still, Boxer planned to retire.

Six months after the attacks, dismayed by “the condition of the country economically, the budget, the shorting of education funding, the need to do more on homeland security,” Boxer and some colleagues took to the Senate floor to urge the Bush administration to change course.

“The next day, Tom DeLay attacked us for daring to speak out in any way critical of the administration,” Boxer said. “I tell you, when that happened, it hit me in a way I can’t describe. But I began to fear for what could happen if people like DeLay and others were challenged, because they could take this precious country based on freedom of speech and free debate and all the things we believe in, and it could really turn into another place.”

The grandmother’s desire to retire burned away. Boxer told her surprised family and staff to start preparing for a reelection campaign. The fighter was ready for another round.

“I stayed in it,” Boxer said, “because I really believe still in all the things I believed in when I got involved in the old days.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Incumbent profile

Name: Barbara Boxer

Born: Nov. 11, 1940, Brooklyn, N.Y.; lives in Greenbrae, Calif.

Education: bachelor’s degree in economics, Brooklyn College, 1962

Personal: married to Stewart Boxer, a lawyer; son Doug and daughter Nicole; one grandson

Party: Democrat

Career: A former stockbroker, journalist and congressional aide, Boxer won election to the Marin County Board of Supervisors in 1976. She served five two-year terms in the House of Representatives before winning election to the U.S. Senate in 1992 and reelection in 1998.

Strategy: Boxer has campaigned against President Bush as much as she has against GOP challenger Bill Jones, arguing that administration policies have left the nation in more precarious positions in national security, economic security and environmental health. She has argued that Jones would be a Bush ally in the Senate, and that Jones’ positions against gun control and abortion, and for offshore drilling (he supported it in the Assembly but now opposes it) put him at odds with most Californians.

Caption

IN CONGRESS: Barbara Boxer is at her desk soon after winning her first House seat in 1982. She served five terms.