Boxer Not Willing to Pull Punches

With liberals dusting themselves off after their November setbacks, California Sen. Barbara Boxer has emerged as the Left's new flamethrower.

The only senator to contest the Electoral College results and the lead interrogator in the battle over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's nomination, Boxer has unquestionably angered President Bush. And GOP strategists have gleefully seized upon her as a symbol of blue-state liberalism.

Within her party, Boxer's new star turn gets mixed reviews. To some, her grilling of Rice at the confirmation hearings was her finest hour. She challenged the nominee's "respect for the truth" in an oration against the Iraq war that prompted the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to launch a fundraising appeal in her name.

Websites call it the Boxer Rebellion.

To others -- and many in Washington suspect that California's other senator, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, is among them -- her lambasting of Rice casts Boxer as an attack dog whose tactics will alienate mainstream voters. Feinstein had introduced Rice at the confirmation hearings.

But whatever others think, to those who have watched Boxer's political career over almost 30 years as a Marin County supervisor and a member of the House and the Senate, the only difference this time is that the whole nation may have been watching. The rest is vintage Boxer, the signature style of her whole career.

"This is just Boxer being Boxer," said David Sandretti, the senator's communications director.

Or, as Bruce Cain, who heads the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, put it: "It's very simple. Boxer looked like Feinstein until the election. Now she's Boxer again."

Boxer professes to marvel at how she has suddenly become the hot Democratic celebrity. She is lionized by her blogger fans as "a true liberal, unlike the weenie-Dems in the Senate and House." She "has the courage of her convictions," one blogger wrote, comparing her favorably to the "conscience of the Senate," the late Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.).

"I'm rather amazed at the response," she said in an interview. "I've been this way all my life."