Meet the Kinder, Gentler Senator

Early this month, when the Whitewater hearings shifted over to the Senate, things had nowhere to go but up.

The House Banking Committee’s performance was roundly criticized as a partisan charade. With members strictly limited to five minutes at the microphone, Democrats lobbed home-run pitches to White House aides while Republicans sought quick attacks.

The Senate Banking Committee, however, showed some backbone. Democrats, along with Republicans, were angry at the cozy ties between White House and Treasury officials and let it show.

One notable exception was Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, who had a kinder view.

“In my view, the White House-Treasury contacts stem from an all-too-human desire to ensure that something that happened eight years ago not interfere with the urgent tasks of governing. No one of us is perfect, and I hope these hearings will help all of us to do a better job for the American people,” she said.

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Boxer’s sympathetic attitude stood out against the roughhouse manner of many of her colleagues, and her remarks cropped up in news articles and commentaries.

The New Republic, the liberal weekly magazine, found Boxer to be “just plain pretentious” when she lectured the committee on the horrors of depression. This was in connection with the suicide of Vince Foster, the White House lawyer whose self-inflicted death continues to fascinate conservative conspiracy theorists.

“There are lessons to be learned from the Foster suicide,” Boxer said. “The first is that every person needs to be alert to the signs of depression in family, friends and colleagues and to recognize that depression is a real illness and requires professional help.”

The New York Times, in a list of “drolleries” culled from the Whitewater hearings, also tweaked Boxer for “finding a silver lining in the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr.”

Boxer landed hard on Treasury counsel Jean E. Hanson (“incompetent”) for failing to correct erroneous testimony by her boss, Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger C. Altman, and both have since resigned their posts.

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But it was Boxer’s remarks to 28-year-old Joshua Steiner, the boyish Treasury Department chief of staff with the incendiary diary, that piqued the most reaction.

Steiner, whose assiduously collected meditations and remembrances (“the last Washington diary--ever,” the New Republic wryly predicted) provoked some of the hearing’s most barbed questioning, disavowed virtually everything he had written. These weren’t factual observations, he rationalized to the senators, but only impressions.

New York Republican Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato blasted Steiner’s recantation as “lamebrained,” and Alabama Democratic Sen. Richard C. Shelby said, “You’ve got a convenient memory, but the diaries speak for themselves.”

Boxer (“senator and mother,” the Washington Post dubbed her in an op-ed piece) came to Steiner’s rescue.

To her, Steiner was reminiscent “of two people I have great respect for . . . my son and daughter. I look at you and I see the exuberance of youth, the exaggeration of youth.

“A lot of these phrases in (the diary) are quite dramatic,” Boxer said. “ ‘Powerless. Fateful. Disaster unfolds. Tortured day.’ Did anyone sit there and torture you, pull your fingernails out? Of course not. You’re just using language here to indicate your feelings about it. And I respect the fact that you have a lot of feelings, because you’re not old like we are, and you’re not numb.

“Just because you’re young doesn’t mean your opinion doesn’t count,” she concluded.

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Boxer’s spirited defense of the Bambi-like Steiner no doubt tightened some neck muscles of some of her male colleagues and left her open to criticism that she was acting as an apologist for the Administration. (She is, after all, related to the First Family. In May, her daughter, Nicole, married Anthony Rodham, the younger brother of Hillary Rodham Clinton.)

“She was just so . . . squishy,” lamented an aide to a veteran Republican committee member. “All that talk about feelings. “

To some Capitol Hill observers who came to know Boxer as the fiery liberal House member from Marin County, her senatorial incarnation seems pallid by comparison.

Boxer has no regrets about her performance at the hearing.

“I was criticized for being too harsh on (Hanson) and too easy on (Steiner),” Boxer explained this week. “But I am what I am. I did think that, in general, the witnesses were really harangued.

“No laws were broken, no rules were violated. But I believe mistakes were made throughout this whole matter. If you’re asking, ‘Were you fair?’ I called it the way I saw it.”