Town Hall Meetings Put Senators on the Map With New Constituents

Jaime Garcia sloshed through a mile of mud and rain between his parents’ trailer home and the nearest paved road for the chance to see Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) at a town hall meeting here.

The 18-year-old student body president at Tranquillity High School told Boxer he is afraid that federal water reforms could put his father out of work and jeopardize his quest to attend college.

Terry Sandhu, a laid-off Lockheed Corp. engineer, attended a similar standing-room-only session in San Jose. She brought her husband, Daljeet Singh Sandhu, also a former Lockheed engineer, and their 8-year-old daughter to hear Boxer. Her husband recently found a job in Sacramento.

“I have hope now,” Terry Sandhu said after listening to Boxer speak about the economy. “I feel so close to government. Just coming to this meeting gives me a little uplift.”

The citizen forum, where plain folks talk straight to their elected representatives, came to California last week as first-year Sens. Boxer and Dianne Feinstein staged seven meetings in four days. Just as voters praised President Clinton for leaving Washington to regain his populist touch through an electronic town meeting in Detroit, the two senators and their series of community meetings across California opened to rave reviews.

More than 2,500 Californians, including business people, blue-collar workers and feminists, packed neighborhood schools and city halls from San Diego to Sacramento. They came to listen, to share gut-wrenching stories of individuals in need, to pay tribute to a pair of trailblazing women and, on occasion, to pose tough questions.

On Wednesday, political junkies in San Jose could see Feinstein at noon in the county building, watch Clinton’s first televised town hall session at 5 p.m. and return to the civic center to catch Boxer two hours later. The 400-seat San Jose City Council Chambers were filled to capacity, with the overflow listening over speakers in a downstairs cafeteria.

Both senators said they considered the meetings unqualified successes and pledged to hold sessions on a regular basis. While these community gatherings are routinely used by state legislators and members of the House of Representatives to keep in close contact with their districts, senators have used them sparingly in large states such as California.

But Feinstein and Boxer say they are determined to take their message directly to people, even if it means spending days crisscrossing the state. Boxer’s trip took her through Riverside, San Diego, Fresno, San Jose and Sacramento in four days.

“This is the part of my job I like best,” Boxer said. “This, to me, is what democracy is all about.”

The meetings featured vastly different formats that appeared to match the political strengths and personalities of each senator.

Boxer had freewheeling, Oprah Winfrey-like sessions that at times generated the enthusiasm of a high school pep rally. She offered engaging anecdotes about her first few weeks in the Senate, including kind words for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s work on health care and disparaging remarks about archconservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). The crowds usually responded with loud and sustained applause, particularly when Boxer touched on feminist issues.

Feinstein seldom offered remarks and rarely played to the crowd’s emotions. Instead, she sat studiously at a table flanked by city officials and listened intently to discussions of crime and violence in California. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, Feinstein said, she expects to play a key role in shaping a sweeping crime bill and wanted to hear “real stories from real people.”

Indeed, residents were not bashful about telling the senators their hopes and dreams as well as their fears as the state wallows in a prolonged economic slump.

Garcia, the Tranquillity High student, told Boxer that his father probably will lose his job as a cotton-field laborer if Central Valley Project water supplies previously used for irrigation are diverted for environmental and urban uses. The senator was told by Alfonso Sierra, president of the Mendota Unified School District, who drove Garcia to the meeting, that the teen-ager is the only member of his impoverished family to have completed elementary school. Garcia, Sierra said, will graduate from high school this spring and hopes to study medicine in college.

“They inspire me to keep going with my education,” Garcia said of his parents. “I don’t want to be like they are and suffer as much as they have.”

Garcia’s appearance, Boxer said, illustrates why it is important to continue holding town hall meetings. “I’ve got people in pin-striped suits who can pay first-class fares to travel to Washington to get in the door to grab me,” Boxer said.

“This child could never hope to do that. He is living in the deepest of poverty, he wants the American dream and he had a chance to tell me. These are the people I want to reach out and touch.”

Boxer began her five-city, four-day trip in Riverside, San Diego and Fresno--all in Republican counties that voted for her opponent, former television commentator Bruce Herschensohn. The meetings had been announced in local papers and Boxer sent out flyers to thousands of people. But many of those who came said they had heard about the forums by word of mouth.

“I really wanted to go to places where people didn’t know me all that well,” Boxer said. “I want the people who didn’t vote for me to feel they have a connection, they have my ear and they have my respect.”

A large contingent of supporters and opponents of the California Desert Protection Act showed up in all three cities. The legislation, introduced last month by Feinstein, would place 7 million acres of desert terrain off limits to hunting, mining and off-road vehicle use.

When opponents criticized Boxer for supporting a bill, she usually responded by urging the two sides to work together. Sometimes her approach put people off.

“I am very sad you are very angry at me about this,” Boxer told Keith Ringgenberg, president of the Outdoor Sportsmen’s Coalition of California in Fresno. “We can work to make people happy.”

Ringgenberg later said in an interview: “I wasn’t angry. I wanted some questions answered and she didn’t answer them. She made it personal.”

But more often she seemed to connect with her audiences.

John Robert Sutton, a San Diego State student who is studying economics and who was a Herschensohn supporter, said he was bitter after the November election. He left the two-hour meeting singing a different tune.

“She is very personable,” Sutton said. “Now I’m kind of inspired by her. She kind of changed my way of thinking on the environment.”

At the beginning of each session, Boxer delivered a 20-minute speech that congratulated the Clinton Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress for getting off to a fast, productive start this year. She proclaimed that “gridlock in Washington has ended,” noting that the Family and Medical Leave Act was approved by Congress and signed into law by Clinton.

The crowds frequently applauded Boxer when she thrust her fist in the air and vowed to fight for allowing gays to serve in the military, banning oil drilling off the California coast, supporting the Clinton Administration’s economic and health care reforms, and cracking down on banking institutions.

“The banks don’t want any regulation,” said Boxer, a member of the Senate Committee on Banking. “They want to go back to the good old days. I’m not going to let that happen. I don’t want another S & L crisis.”

After her opening statement, Boxer turned over the microphone to members of the audience, whose questions were not screened.

The questions focused primarily on substantive issues: defense conversion, international trade, campaign finance reform and the soaring deficit. Rarely did audiences raise the subject of “Nannygate,” the flap over the hiring of illegal immigrants by women whom Clinton had tapped to serve as attorney general.

Rex Kahler of Ocean Beach said the two-hour meeting at San Diego State gave him an insight into Boxer and the issues that he could not get from the news media.

“I’m not getting an eight-second sound bite,” Kahler said. “I’m able to get both sides of the issues. I wish it could happen more often.”

Feinstein heard only a few of the personal stories from crime victims. In Oakland, all but 30 minutes of a two-hour meeting was set aside for Feinstein to hear the views of nearly two dozen city officials and community activists.

Molly Wetzel told Feinstein of the problems caused by crack houses in the inner cities. After drug dealers took over a vacant house in her downtown neighborhood, Wetzel said, her teen-age son had a gun pointed at his head and her teen-age daughter was propositioned by men looking for prostitutes.

In both meetings, Feinstein heard pleas for federal money to aid the homeless, to pay for child-care and youth programs, and to fund counseling programs as an alternative to new jail facilities.

“The crime bill can’t be all just (prison) sentences and getting tough,” Feinstein said. “There has to be an element of prevention, rehabilitation and strengthening of education. That is what I heard in these meetings.”