SENATOR PACKWOOD RESIGNS : Firm Stance in Packwood Case Has Rewards for Boxer : Senate: The California Democrat stands to gain a bigger campaign finance base and national recognition for pushing for hearings, experts say.

If Oregon’s Bob Packwood meticulously, if unwittingly, scripted his own demise, Senate colleague Barbara Boxer of California deserves a healthy measure of co-authorship.

When the Senate Ethics Committee last month rejected public hearings into Packwood’s sexual misbehavior, Boxer badgered her fellow members into an unsuccessful floor vote to force open hearings, sending senators home for their summer recess into a buzz saw of angry constituents.

“It was a turning point in this case,” Boxer said Thursday. “I did it because I thought it was going to be swept under the rug. But what happened is I put the spotlight on the Packwood case and on the institution’s own policies.

“The more the nation looked at it, the more [constituents] told their senators this thing could not be covered up,” she said. “Their constituencies were way ahead of this Republican Senate.”

The first-term California Democrat’s decision to buck Senate protocol has earned her national political points. Seen as a solitary lawmaker battling the institution’s seeming spinelessness, she tapped into an ocean of public disrespect for Congress--and probably broadened her campaign finance base as well.

But how will the outspoken liberal feminist fare within the marble walls of the upper chamber? “I believe I will gain more respect because I had the guts to take a lonely stand and stick with it,” she said.

But some experts on Congress think otherwise.

“She quite reasonably can boast that she had an impact on bringing Packwood down,” said Larry Sabato, a professor of government at the University of Virginia. “But she has emerged from this as one of the least-popular senators in the U.S. Senate.”

Yet in the age of the political outsider, even that may work as a plus.

“She had to take a hard stand and play the tough guy,” Sabato said. “That doesn’t endear you to people. But it certainly does help her with women’s groups and financing for her next campaign in ’98.”

Boxer, who has recently become a near-fixture on television talk shows, now has the national profile that she lacked before the Packwood controversy. In the world of campaign finance, that means she can cast a wider net.

While women may be flocking to her side, her bad-cop role in the Packwood melodrama threatens to alienate some men.

“She had a substantial gender gap in 1992 and I’d be willing to place an early bet that she will have one of the largest--if not the largest--in 1998,” Sabato said.

Yet Boxer said she has been overwhelmed at the favorable reaction of men.

“Everywhere I go, men come up to me. As I was leaving a newspaper editorial board meeting [during the recess], a sports editor with three daughters said: ‘I just want to thank you.’ It’s been amazing.”

In her 1992 election victory, Boxer said that she won 57% of the women’s vote and only 43% of the men’s. “There’s no doubt I needed those votes from men,” she said. But polls have shown that 60% of men favored Boxer’s call for open Packwood hearings.

Will her stand close the gap? Boxer thinks it will. “In general, this has been very broadly supported.”