Boxer Keeps Her Distance From Jones’ Case

This time around, Barbara Boxer is giving an incumbent’s speech. Before a luncheon with two citizens groups in San Diego, the Democrat boasts of the impact she’s had in Washington, and why she believes she should win a second term in 1998.

She clicks off successes the way ammunition explodes from a clip--bills she supported that dealt with the minimum wage, the California desert, the budget, health care.

It is all very reminiscent of 1992 vintage Boxer, when she was the upstart Marin County congresswoman given little chance of winning the Senate seat, when she was talking about jobs, the economy, education, and all the things she’s touting still.

All the things, except one.

Last time around, the Senate contest coincided with explosive accusations of sexual harassment leveled by law professor Anita Hill against Republican Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Thomas denied the claims, but the passions of women across the nation were inflamed, and none more so than Barbara Boxer’s.

Taken together, other issues may have gotten more attention from Boxer, but none gave her candidacy more emotional heft.

A mainstay of her campaign speech was horror at the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee’s reluctance to allow Hill to testify about her accusations. Boxer would graphically describe her march--along with six other women House members--to the Senate, where they demanded hearings.

She took to the floor of the House and made an impassioned plea on Hill’s behalf. “Imagine yourself dependent on another human being for your livelihood. . . . Imagine that person making suggestive comments to you,” she said. “Would you be intimidated? Yes, especially if you are in your 20s and you are a woman in a man’s world.”

The incident kicked off her campaign advertisements, and formed the impetus for Boxer’s 1993 book “Strangers in the Senate,” where she disclosed that she had once been harassed. Her most public role in the Senate thus far has been her successful crusade for the 1995 resignation, under a cloud of sexual harassment charges, of Republican Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon.

This time around, it is deja vu all over again. This Senate campaign, too, begins in the midst of widespread publicity about sexual harassment, once again made by a young woman underling about a male boss.

Paula Jones, a former state employee in Arkansas, claims that then-Gov. Bill Clinton came on to her in a Little Rock hotel room. She has pressed her harassment claim against him all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Clinton has denied Jones’ accusations, and the conflict is moving toward trial.

And about Paula Jones, Barbara Boxer has been remarkably quiet.

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Boxer is hardly alone. None of the larger women’s organizations that once trumpeted Hill’s torment have sided as overtly with Jones.

Ask why, and the answers hint at technicalities. All they were trying to do in the Hill case was guarantee her a hearing before the Senate, they say. Jones, they argue, is already guaranteed her day in court.

“Every person deserves their day in court and she [Jones] does as well,” Boxer said the other day. “She should pursue her case and I’ve supported her pursuing her case.”

Boxer said it is wrong to compare the two cases. Hill’s accusations were made about a man whose appointment had to be approved by the Senate, the body Boxer was trying to join, she said.

“The second case is about something that happened . . . when Bill Clinton was governor. So it’s just different on its face,” Boxer said.

Among many of Anita Hill’s supporters, there is thinly veiled suspicion about Jones--just as Hill was suspect among conservatives.

“Paula Jones has been backed by a very conservative, right-wing crowd that collectively has fought against the very laws she is in court to take advantage of,” said Kathy Spillar, national coordinator for the Feminist Majority Foundation. “It does give you pause.”

A bigger problem, particularly for Boxer, is the target--Clinton.

Like other politically liberal women, Boxer has to weigh supporting a woman whose motives many question, or sticking by a president who has proved his worth to them with his Supreme Court appointments, his agenda and his veto power over anti-abortion legislation.

And he is not just Boxer’s ideological colleague. He is also a face across the Thanksgiving Day table, for her daughter, Nicole, is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother Tony.

“What are you going to do, bash your daughter’s brother-in-law?” asked political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe.

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At this point, it seems unlikely that Boxer will suffer any political consequences for her relative silence, apart from a few squirms.

For one thing, if there ever is a trial in Jones’ case, it quite likely will not take place until after the November 1998 election.

For another, neither Hill nor Jones commands majority support. Nearly six years ago, when Hill’s charges against Thomas first surfaced, a Times poll found that only a third of Americans believed her--about the same level of support won by Jones in a recent survey by another national pollster.

“The American public has changed the way they judge politicians,” Jeffe said. “The most important question is ‘What have you done for me lately?’ All the rest is static.”

A larger concern, perhaps, is whether the partisan hue and cry over sexual harassment will cause people to view it solely as a weapon to wield against an opponent. Susan Carpenter McMillan, the conservative activist who has befriended Paula Jones, raises that concern.

In the minds of many, she says, “The issue of sexual harassment is a political tool.”

En route to San Diego’s airport the other day, Boxer was asked if she is similarly worried. She stared ahead, her words barely audible.

“Oh, I think this is quite different. Because of the people involved in it,” she said.

On Paula Jones’ side or the president’s, she was asked.

“All of them. If you look at all of the people, it’s become. . . .”

Her last words were lost to traffic.