Even Clinton Can’t Counter Boxer’s Left

President Clinton’s finger-in-the-wind presidency has sent signals that some tax cuts may be announced in next month’s State of the Union Address--a preemptive strike against impending Republican measures. Moreover, for Democrats who are kamikaze defenders of Clinton-Gore scandals, tax cut proposals are intended by the president to offset their reelection vulnerabilities in 1998.

One has in mind such see-no-evil idolaters as California’s junior senator, Barbara Boxer.

But despite his shrewd political generosity, even Clinton isn’t able to loosen Boxer’s vise-grip embrace of the statist left. Asked a few months back about high taxes on successful people, Boxer responded by adopting her late father’s advice: “Kiss the ground if you have to pay taxes.”

One suspects that millions of American taxpayers would prefer kissing a more romantic location.

Next year, California voters will have a chance to accept or reject this and other bizarre pronouncements. Boxer is up for reelection--a prime opportunity for citizens to reflect on the oddball views that have made her an enormous embarrassment to the state of California.

However, voters need to be especially alert since the mainstream political media are usually inclined to color over Boxer’s extreme views with a Joan of Arc patina. They use phrases such as “maverick,” “fighter,” “boat-rocker” and “tough.” Every now and then, they will be daring and--omigosh--call her a “liberal.”

The reality is that from persona to policy positions, Boxer belongs over on the port side’s outer limits with others who historically have used the United States Senate as a sandbox for extreme views. Only a majority Republican Senate elected in 1994 protected the union from her radical mischief.

Herewith a paper-thin slice of the Boxer record:

* She once reaped massive publicity by railing against waste in defense procurements. Yet two years ago the Citizens Against Government Waste recorded her voting against taxpayers on wasteful government spending nearly 90% of the time--complementing her designation by the National Taxpayers Union a few years back as the “biggest spender in Congress.”

* Last year, the feisty little “fighter” fought to increase the budget for the discredited National Endowment for the Arts and against streamlining death penalty appeals. She also opposed the embargo of Communist Cuba, voted against welfare reform and continued to support rights of wildlife over the historical water rights of farmers.

* When it came to Proposition 209--which Californians supported to eliminate hiring preferences--Boxer blustered that the initiative was actually “intended to start a gender war,” and should be called the “uncivil rights initiative.”

* In 1993, Boxer recommended to Clinton that he nominate Sam Paz to a coveted federal District Court judgeship. Paz was a former president of the ACLU who made his living as a plaintiff’s rights attorney specializing in suing police officers and who was the headliner at a lawyers’ seminar on just how to go about doing it. Boxer called Paz an “outstanding individual.”

* As for international thuggery, here’s another gem: After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Boxer blamed not Saddam the madman but “the arms race of the ‘80s” that armed Iraq.

* Finally, while she earned her publicity bones by hectoring Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a sexual harasser, Boxer’s fallen in line with the feminist left who won’t lift a finger for Paula Jones, whose credible claims against Bill Clinton are wholly more serious than any made against Justice Thomas by Anita Hill.

Little wonder that recent polls on Boxer’s reelection chances show her getting less than 50% of the vote against her potential Senate opponents, some of them barely known to the public. Despite her crab-wise moves toward the political center, voters are clearly aware that Boxer is on the extreme fringe of her party--a careerist of the loony left and poster person for high taxes, monster government spending, job quotas, criminal rights and environmental quackery.

An inveterate publicity hound, the senator recently staged hearings regarding chemicals added to gasoline for pollution reduction. Though she admitted voting for such additives in 1990, she now wants them outlawed. Her explanation? “We didn’t know what we were doing” in 1990.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.