In Senate Race, War Is Not the Big Issue

Alice Sigler and Kathleen Hudgins, both Southern Californians, share a political affiliation -- they are Republicans. From that point on, though, they part ways significantly.

Sigler, 71, of Walnut, believes the war in Iraq was worth fighting and supports the U.S. Senate bid of Republican Bill Jones, who backs President Bush’s approach to combating terrorism.

Out in the Coachella Valley, Hudgins, 58, opposes the war and supports incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, an early vocal critic of the Iraq invasion.

But Sigler and Hudgins share one other political trait too. Neither says the war matters when deciding whether to back Boxer or Jones.

“The war comes in when I’m voting for president, not when I’m voting for the Senate,” said Sigler, a retired legal secretary whose vote is influenced by a religious, conservative take on social policies. Even if Jones opposed the war and Boxer supported it, she said she still would vote for Jones. “I could not vote for Barbara Boxer. She’s too liberal for me -- pro-choice .... I’m speaking from my Christian beliefs.”

The war in Iraq has dominated national politics since 2002, when the Bush administration began pushing for a military resolution to Saddam Hussein’s intransigence over United Nations-ordered weapons inspections, and it remains a key rallying point for supporters of Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry.

It’s no different here in California, where voters of all political stripes tell pollsters they view the war as one of the most important issues of the day. But some likely voters say the war does not figure highly when it comes time for them to pick a senator.

“It’s based on other issues,” said Hudgins, a nurse who is backing Boxer largely for her stances on women’s issues, such as her defense of abortion rights and her support for social programs. “Barbara Boxer has been visible for us. She’s been supportive of programs, especially for minorities.”

Nationwide, the war has been pervasive in Senate races, but “not huge,” said Jennifer Duffy, who tracks Senate races for the Cook Political Report in Washington, D.C.

“Maybe it’s because they don’t think an individual senator can do much,” Duffy said. She suspected some candidates feared touching the issue too directly.

“If you’re going to talk about your opponent and the war, there’s a fine line that shouldn’t be crossed,” Duffy said. “It’s the patriotism line, so if you’re going to do it, you have to do it pretty carefully and it better be based on votes.”

On California’s Senate campaign trail, the war figures prominently in the candidates’ speeches, more so for Boxer -- who speaks about the presidential race as much as about her own -- than for Jones. But while an antiwar current runs through crowds at her campaign events, Boxer said most voters likely recognize that decisions on war and peace fall largely to the president.

“I’ve never seen a situation in my lifetime where the country went to war because Congress wanted to but the president didn’t,” Boxer said this week from Washington. “But I think people want to hear you talk about it.”

Jones said the war fuels Californians’ overall concerns for their personal safety, as does crime.

“The No. 1 responsibility of government is to protect the people, and if you don’t do that well, all the other responsibilities are secondary,” Jones said after a recent campaign appearance atop San Diego’s Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial. “If you are successful in improving people’s security, that’s fundamental not just to an election but to governance.... I think it’s in the front of people’s minds. I think it could be” a deciding issue.

The former California secretary of state has built his campaign on the idea that sending him to the Senate would complete a political revolution he believes began with last year’s recall election that replaced Democratic Gov. Gray Davis with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Jones has cited the war as a measure of Boxer’s commitment to national security. Boxer was one of 23 senators who voted against giving Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. Jones said that vote and others -- Boxer’s votes against big-ticket weapons systems and her preference for military action by broad alliances over unilateral efforts -- are evidence that she is soft on defense issues.

Jones lumps Boxer and Kerry together as being “opposed [to] a very strong military presence, and a strong message from this country, whether it be the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, or whether we go back with Kerry and the Vietnam War.”

He also has said Boxer’s opposition to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the latest conflict endangers national security.

In March, Jones compared opponents of the U.S.-led invasion with 1930s appeasers who, he said, failed to move against fascism as it rose in Europe, hoping the problem would go away.

“Those problems did not go away, and the entire world, including the United States, paid a terrible price,” Jones said. “These people believe that if we ignore the problem or avoid confronting it, that the terrorists will leave us alone.... This attitude was wrong in the 1930s and it’s wrong in 2004. And the critical difference today is that the consequences of inaction are as great as the threat to American citizens that we faced in World War II.”

Boxer did vote to give President Clinton authority to go into Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars by Slobodan Milosevic’s mostly Serbian forces. And, more recently, she voted for a joint resolution to authorize U.S. military force against those responsible for terror attacks against the United States.

Still, Boxer sees the Iraq war as part of “a foreign policy that is literally killing our people every single day,” as she told supporters at a Laguna Beach rally last week.

Boxer described the war as part of the Bush administration’s broad “go it alone” approach that she said also has led to administrative rollbacks of more than 350 environmental regulations, failure to fund the controversial “No Child Left Behind” schools act and tax cuts that reward the wealthy while running up the national debt.

Boxer defends her vote against giving the president authority to wage war against Iraq as an act of prescience. Describing it as “one of the loneliest votes” she’s cast, Boxer also said, “I’m so glad I made that vote.”