Boxer’s Tactics Show Her Not Fit for Office

Aficionados of word games especially enjoy topping one another with the most creative oxymoron--a combination of contradictory words (such as “cruel kindness”). One way never to lose such contests is to utter the ultimate set of contradictory words: “the distinguished junior senator from California.”

Barbara Boxer is anything but. She richly deserves her reputation for being a partisan, divisive, left-wing grandstander--a millionaire suburbanite whose embrace of extremism collides with the California mainstream. She entered the Senate in 1992 as an accident of history: On the strength of the Bush organization’s abandonment of California, infatuation with the “Year of the Woman,” and an 11th-hour Democratic Party smear of her opponent engineered with the knowledge of her campaign.

Thus, a major statewide voter opinion poll has placed Boxer’s unfavorable rating at 48% with only 42% viewing her favorably. She got these marks the old-fashioned way: She earned them.

Now our junior senator is on the cusp of electoral repudiation--a reward for the smarminess she propagated early in her career. Running in a tight race for her county Board of Supervisors in the 1970s, Boxer made such false accusations against her rival that a judge ordered them dropped.

In 1982, Boxer ran for Congress against Dennis McQuaid, a one-time seminarian whose views on abortion were deeply felt and at least deserved respect. But Boxer allowed her campaign workers to spray-paint coat hangers on McQuaid’s signs--her dark contribution to the notion of rational debate.

And now she’s at it again, ever the blindly ambitious partisan willing to slime anyone getting in the way of her climb up the greasy pole of politics. This time the victim is Matt Fong, California state treasurer, graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and lieutenant colonel in the reserves.

Boxer’s negative commercials are stunning for their brazen attack on the truth:

* She charges “Matt Fong is not pro-choice.” But Fong repeatedly has stated his support for a woman’s right to choose in the first trimester. And Boxer knows it.

* She charges that Fong opposes “hold[ing] HMOs accountable in a court of law.” But he has expressly stated his support for a patient’s right to sue an HMO while advocating tort reform to rein in greedy lawyers. And Boxer knows it.

* She charges her opponent with opposing “new bans on assault weapons,” while omitting Fong’s strong support of the original assault weapons ban of 1994. And she does it intentionally.

Boxer breached good taste in her first debate with Fong by attacking his wife--a line decent candidates do not cross. Last summer she unleashed an ugly diatribe on a Senate colleague, Dan Coats, calling him “unpatriotic” for daring to express principled disagreement with Bill Clinton’s airstrikes in Sudan and Afghanistan.

Perhaps the most egregious deceit that voters clearly see this year is the sumo-sized hypocrisy Boxer has shown with regard to Clinton’s serial lying and atrocious behavior. Who can forget the picture of Boxer marching up the steps of the U.S. Capitol in a whirlwind of outrage to denounce Clarence Thomas? But who can forgive her for being ensconced in the storm cellar as Paula Jones fought for her rights against the hurricane-force onslaughts of White House males?

She slashed Bob Packwood for boorish behavior and sought the scalps of Navy officers over Tailhook. In 1992, her campaign supporters spied on and sought to destroy one of the singularly principled and decent men in public life, Bruce Herschensohn, for accompanying his girlfriend and another couple to a girlie show in Hollywood.

Yet Boxer for months was remarkably muted regarding the personal girlie show Bill Clinton orchestrated a couple of feet away from the phone that could start a nuclear war. And she welcomes him into our state to raise money to replenish her mud supply.

Barbara Boxer once pounded the Pentagon over $7,500 coffeepots in cargo planes. However overpriced, they at least worked when American lives were risked during the 1991 Gulf War--more success than can be claimed for the $136,700 taxpayers pay Boxer for peddling the politics of fear.

We reserve impeachment for corrupt presidents. For the junior senator from California we need only a simple ballot. Let’s put it to good use.