In Senate, Boxer Still a Fighter but Her Style Softens

The elevator was crowded and Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, all 5 feet of her, found herself staring into the tie clip of a big, beefy Republican from Michigan. She was holding a fistful of index cards listing reasons her GOP colleagues should support her nominee for a federal judgeship.

Sen. Spencer Abraham looked down on her fondly as if to say, “Oh, here you are again!”

“Look what I have for you,” she chirped, waving the cards at him.

“I love this!” Abraham beamed. “It’s the best buttonholing I’ve had since I’ve been here.”

As Boxer seeks a second term this fall, Republican strategists insist that her politics and personality make her vulnerable. But as her elevator encounter indicated, this is not the feminist hell-raiser who after 10 years in the House was best remembered for leading a charge of women up the Senate steps to defend Anita Hill as Hill came under attack after leveling sexual harassment charges against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

That was Barbara Boxer, the Marin County congresswoman. This is Barbara Boxer, the California senator, a lawmaker who has softened her style to suit the upper house, lobbying more often with little 3-by-5s than verbal 2-by-4s.

If she was once branded an uncompromising liberal too shrill for delicate political ears, Boxer is now more like a Pekingese who latches onto a pant leg and won’t let go. Her colleagues can’t shake her loose, but they don’t seem to mind her tugging, either.

“Sen. Boxer and I often disagree, but she is always willing to work together,” said Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), who sits with Boxer on the Appropriations Committee. “She’s a fighter, and I have to respect that.”

If her approach is different, her convictions are not: The National Journal recently crowned her 1997’s most liberal senator.

It is that record that has fueled the hopes of the two Republicans vying to replace her--wealthy car alarm magnate Darrell Issa and state Treasurer Matt Fong.

Still, even on the issues front, there are signs of change. Although she remains committed to protecting the environment and advancing the causes of women and children, she also now favors the death penalty for heinous crimes, has been a leading advocate for the Silicon Valley and is concerned that the Endangered Species Act is sometimes too strictly enforced.

The shift comes less from a change of heart than a broadened portfolio, Boxer says. In the House, her constituency was an affluent Bay Area community mostly concerned about clean air and water. Now she represents the nation’s most populous state, one that has struggled during her tenure with crime, recession and a troubled public education system.

“My congressional district had pockets of problems, but in general the concern was environmental, not so much economic,” she said on a recent morning. “I’ve kept all that up but have added a lot of other issues.”

Boxer has sponsored several bills that passed into law, many of them while her party was in the minority. They include measures that:

* Limited the amount of pension funds firms can invest in their own stock, a bill passed in response to department store bankruptcies that left workers with no 401(k) funds.

* Raised safe drinking water standards, once set for a 155-pound adult, to a level considered safe for children. She is pursuing similar changes in standards for clean air and Superfund sites.

* Expanded tax breaks for companies that donate new and nearly new computers and software to public schools.

Among her top legislative priorities now are safety standards for so-called junk handguns, required child-safety locks on firearms and a bill that would set up after-school programs from 3 to 5 p.m., the period when, studies show, unsupervised children get into the most trouble.

Her Senate persona is all the more surprising because during her years in the House, Boxer was known as one of Washington’s most polarizing figures, preaching a liberal line that did not waver even when it became about as popular as carjacking.

Even now in the Senate, standing on the “Boxer box” that precedes her to every podium so she can reach the mike, she is nearly always at full volume, conveying the same level of passion whether the issue is the temperature of frozen chickens or the failings of HMOs.

But behind the scenes, in the stately Appropriations Committee, there is no place for histrionics. This is the panel that parcels out one-third of the federal budget, where the object is not to spout ideology but to bring home the bacon.

Boxer has been an effective negotiator for California, helping rake in $11 billion for Northridge quake relief, $59 million for the Alameda Transportation Corridor, more than $200 million for El Nino relief and $26 million for a Los Angeles Harbor improvement project.

As one of the newer members, she is perched at the end of the committee table, where seats are assigned by seniority. But she is always at the table, even when other senators have left the daily grind to their aides, one GOP committee staffer said.

“You can see the chairman and the ranking member and then you look around and all the seats are empty until you get to the freshmen, and there she is,” the staffer said. “She always has something to say--on everything. And it’s usually related to her state.” The staffer added: “She has earned the respect of the most senior members. And she’s done a good job getting a pile of money for California.”

Part of her clout comes automatically from representing a state so huge that it is not easily ignored. But Democrats and Republicans alike say she has evolved into a savvy horse trader not content to take no for an answer, but knowing when to compromise for progress.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), ranking member of the appropriations panel’s water subcommittee, recalled how Boxer pestered him so long about getting $750,000 to help save a Northern California lagoon that he finally just gave it to her.

“She is a bulldog, just a fighter,” Reid said. “And you can’t get rid of her. She keeps coming back.”

Indeed, like a surgeon named Cutting or a carpenter christened Wood, Boxer is aptly named. If there is a word that sums up her style, it is “fight”; she uses it about 30 times a day. But although the zest for political combat has often worked to her advantage in Congress, it has sometimes worked to the peril of her public image.

Boxer is aware of this; she knows that in almost any room, there are guaranteed to be people who love her and people who hate her.

But she said that the last time she enjoyed widespread favor was when she was elected the most popular girl in high school. Now 57, she insisted she is more concerned with being principled than being liked.

“You are known by your friends and you are known by your enemies,” she said. “It’s a compliment that the Sierra Club and the pro-choice groups endorse me and it’s a compliment that the [National Rifle Assn.] and [Christian conservative leader] Ralph Reed and the polluters want me out. If I were ineffective, they wouldn’t care.”

It was midmorning, before the elevator ride she shared with Abraham, and Boxer was working the phones for Margaret Morrow, her federal judge nominee. The nomination had been hung up for months; she was confident of the vote, but wasn’t taking any chances.

The chief of staff to Sen. Jim Jeffords (R-Vt.) was on the line.

“I gave [Jeffords] a folder that has some interesting things in it,” Boxer told the aide. “I think everything [Morrow] stands for Jim stands for. She’s just not this activist and this liberal da da da. . . . Would you take it upon yourself to have him call me by this afternoon if there’s any problem? I want to give you the private line into my office.”

Now she was on hold for some other GOP senator. “I love the music he has on this phone. [Senate Majority Leader Trent] Lott [R-Miss.] has marching music. I want to go off to war when I’m waiting on that phone,” she says.

When the day was over, Morrow had her federal judgeship. Weeks later, Boxer thought about how she wanted her political epitaph to read.

“She fought for the people she represented,” she said. “She always fought trying to make their lives better, their environment cleaner, protecting their freedoms. And she never gave up.”

Times staff writer Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.