During her trip home to California this week, Sen. Barbara Boxer limited her public events to two school visits -- the kind she calls "nonpolitical."
But Boxer's private schedule for the week made clear that her mind was very much on her political future: She darted to seven private gatherings with campaign donors in Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco.
More than 20 months remain before the Democratic senator is up for reelection, but already she is campaigning hard for a third term -- if mostly behind closed doors raising money.
So far, no Republican has formally announced a bid to unseat Boxer. But leaders of the California GOP see her as a prime target to reverse an eight-year losing streak that culminated in the defeat of every Republican on the statewide ballot last November.
At the state GOP convention this weekend in Sacramento, four of Boxer's potential challengers -- three congressmen and businessman Bill Simon Jr. -- are drawing attention to their political ambitions by holding receptions for party loyalists. One of them, Rep. Doug Ose of Sacramento, has already begun testing a theme that Republicans have used against her -- to no avail -- for years.
"People just feel that Barbara Boxer is too liberal and out of the mainstream, and they're tired of it," Ose said in an interview.
Boxer is indeed one of the country's most liberal senators. But in an era when Democrats in California win elections with broad support from independents and moderate Republicans, Boxer has blunted such attacks by casting her critics as more conservative than the state as a whole.
"They may think that I'm out of step," she said. "I'm definitely out of step with the far right that they represent. But I'm not out of step with mainstream Californians, because I fight for their values, and I always have."
In 1998, when Boxer beat Republican Matt Fong by 10 points, she succeeded in large part by painting him as too conservative for California, especially on gun control and abortion rights.
"You couldn't have distinguished him -- when the campaign was over -- from Attila the Hun," said Fong strategist Sal Russo.
Boxer strategist Roy Behr said that this time she will focus mainly on her values and record. But he hinted that, once again, Boxer will seek to pin whoever emerges as her GOP challenger into an ideological corner.
"They are all, every single one of them, outside the mainstream of California voters," Behr said.
The best known of those weighing a run for the Republican nomination -- to be decided in the March 2004 primary -- is Simon, who lost the governor's race last year to Democratic incumbent Gray Davis. Simon's opposition to gun control and legal abortion was a central line of attack for Davis. In a Senate race, Simon would need to overcome a flood of bad publicity from his tumultuous gubernatorial campaign; he would also have to repair an image marred by Davis television ads that depicted him as a dishonest and incompetent creature of Wall Street.
For weeks, Simon has been back on the political dinner circuit, and at the party convention today, he plans to meet with leaders of his new political action committee.
Also looking at the Senate race is Rep. George P. Radanovich, a Mariposa County winery owner. For weeks, he has been dashing across California meeting party leaders, elected officials and potential donors. His political advisor, Dan Schnur, said Radanovich was "surveying the landscape."
Another congressman considering the race is Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), who lost his party's 1998 Senate nomination to Fong. A former Issa political aide has set up a "Draft Darrell" Web site. It says that Issa, a wealthy businessman, "has the resources needed to take on Barbara Boxer and her liberal Hollywood friends like Rob Reiner and Martin Sheen."
But the most active potential Senate contender so far has been Ose, a wealthy Sacramento businessman elected to Congress in 1998. Ose has visited San Diego, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire and other areas far from his district in what he compares -- with admitted reluctance -- to Hillary Rodham Clinton's "listening tour" of New York in preparation for her Senate candidacy in 2000.
This week, Ose became the first of the group to engage Boxer in a public skirmish. He tried to undermine her visit to a Sacramento school on Tuesday by dispatching an aide there to distribute a statement saying she voted against after-school programs -- a longtime favorite cause of Boxer's.
Boxer responded by saying it was inappropriate for Ose to try to tarnish a "senatorial event" designed to promote after-school programs. She said the vote he referred to dealt with a spending measure that would harm the environment and included too little money for after-school programs and homeland security.
"That was kind of bad taste," she said. "He hasn't even declared yet, and he's sending out negative press releases. People don't like that, I'm convinced."
