Chapter Five
From an Asterisk in the Polls to Senator
Why would I ever give up a safe seat in the House of Representatives where I was helping to make a difference on important issues and enjoying the camaraderie of that raucous Democratic caucus? How did I ever think I could win a race for the United States Senate in 1992, running as a liberal in a purple state that had never elected a woman to the Senate?
Believe me, there was nobody… not one pundit, Democratic or Republican, not one person, who thought it was a bet worth making.
“It’s impossible, Barbara. I can’t stand the thought of your losing a platform for national issues. Please don’t run.”
That was what one of my best political friends, Joyce Linker, told me. Joyce was the mastermind behind my Women Making History fund-raisers, luncheons honoring women trailblazers, a tradition I kept for more than thirty years. Her blunt assessment was a sentiment shared by countless supporters.
But winning was not my original reason for running. I knew the United States Senate was the brass ring, the impossible dream for me. I also knew that just running a good, visible campaign would give me a megaphone that I had never had before. I couldn’t and wouldn’t run for another term in the House. I had to get away from there, and the person most responsible for that compelling impulse was a guy named Newton Leroy Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich was an assistant professor at the University of West Georgia who had been denied tenure and was twice defeated before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1978 on the Republican ticket. Therefore, he was on the minority side of the aisle and had already been building his power base among the most conservative members of Congress for four years by the time I arrived. At the same time I started my House tenure as part of the largest Democratic freshman class since Watergate, Gingrich founded the Conservative Opportunity Society. Ronald Reagan endorsed the COS ideas in his 1984 presidential re-election campaign, including their goals on crime, social issues, economic growth, and education, none of which he’d ever mentioned during his first term as president. Then, in 1989, Newt became the House Minority Whip and announced that he was going to “build a much more aggressive, activist party.”
Although Newt always tried to sound high-minded, it was clear to me from the outset that he was really into the politics of personal destruction. I think he started the modern chapter of that down-low, tough technique. For example, he went after the Democratic speaker, Jim Wright, which led to Jim’s resignation in 1989. Newt’s charge was that Wright was enriching himself, because the speaker’s supporters were buying copies of Wright’s book in bulk. Of course, years later Newt took a four-million-dollar advance on his own book from his biggest supporter, Rupert Murdoch, who owned the company that published his book, and Newt never gave it a moment’s thought. Selective ethics. But eventually, as we say in politics, what goes around comes around, and Newt resigned. Later the House Ethics Committee concluded that he had intentionally and recklessly provided false information on the tax-exempt status of a college course he was running for political purposes.
Wright, an eloquent speaker, had a few things to say about Gingrich, including the “mindless cannibalism” and “seeds of hate sown” by Gingrich in the House. Add to that this summation: “Newt Gingrich’s tendency to outrageous verbal abuse and reckless accusations against anyone who stands in the way of his personal ambition has fatally flawed any chance to achieve a degree of harmonious reconciliation necessary for an effective Congress.”
I myself would have put it this way: “Newt, you wrecked the House for me. Really. Forever.”
Shortly after he disposed of Wright, in 1990, Gingrich distributed a notorious memo called “Language, a Key Mechanism of Control” that urged his followers in the Republican Party to “speak like Newt,” using negative words like “radical… sick traitors” when attacking the Democrats and positive words like “opportunity… courage… and principled” when describing Republicans. He wasn’t mentioning my name, but he was calling me, and my Democratic colleagues, traitors. Jim Wright had compared Newt to Joe McCarthy and he was right. Yes, Joe McCarthy reborn and with a high-pitched, irritating voice to boot.
It was appalling. I hated it. This was a kind of tough that was down so low, I couldn’t believe it. Newt had a take-no-prisoners attitude and it made me recoil. He was steadily converting the House of Representatives from a functional legislative pillar of democracy to a polarized fistfight.
I never had a direct run-in with Gingrich. I stayed out of his way and I was much too small a fish in that large pond to become a target for him. But knowing my tendency to confront, I knew it was only a matter of time before I came up against him and his minions, and I wanted no part of it. When you join someone in the gutter, it’s not pretty for anybody.
I had to leave the House.
In 1990, California’s veteran Democratic Senator Alan Cranston decided not to run for re-election in 1992. Then, in a once-in-a-lifetime happenstance, the second California Senate seat came up for election in 1992 as Senator Pete Wilson left the Senate to become Governor Pete Wilson. Wilson had appointed John Seymour to the seat temporarily, but Seymour would have to face the voters in 1992 for the right to complete Wilson’s term, which went until 1994. So the Cranston seat was a six-year seat; the Seymour seat was a two-year seat. The possibilities for my running began to look more interesting because I knew Dianne Feinstein was interested as well, and there was a path for us not to have to run against each other.
Newt was the ill wind at my back, unbeknownst to him, pushing me out of the House and toward a long-shot Senate race. But the next person to influence my decision in a very different way was my dear friend and former colleague, Senator Barbara Mikulski.
Barbara had welcomed me to the House and for a couple of years I served with her there, before she made history by becoming the very first Democratic woman elected in her own right to the United States Senate. Before Barbara, all of the handful of Democratic women had been appointed to the Senate, usually after their husbands died.
Barbara had been in that first aerobic class that led to our integrating women into the previously all-male House of Representatives gym back in 1983. We were buddies. So I phoned her to make an appointment and tell her about my considering a run to join her in the Senate.
“Come right over to my office, Babs,” she said.
I already loved her for that “Babs,” because that’s what my dad always called me, and that’s what Barbara calls me to this day. It never fails to make me smile, even if the news she has isn’t good.
“Do it,” she said, after I’d explained to her I was considering running. “Even as a freshman senator, you’ll have more power than you do over there in the House.”
“There could be a tough primary fight, Barbara,” I explained. “I’ve heard about other Democrats who want to run and they’re raising tons of money from the kind of political base that I don’t have.”
I told her that it appeared that I would have at least two very strong opponents in the Democratic primary: Lieutenant Governor Leo McCarthy from the Bay Area, and Congressman Mel Levine of Los Angeles. I also told her that our initial polling showed that in a three-way match-up, Leo was over 50 percent, Mel hovered around 15 percent. And me? I was an asterisk, meaning I didn’t even reach 1 percent.
“That’s okay. Go for it, Babs,” she said with a smile. “Look what happened to me. I had two guys too. They thought I was so unimportant that they ignored me in the primary, attacked each other like mad, and I kind of walked through the middle unscathed. How’s that for a strategy?”
“That might be my only strategy, given where I am in the polls.” I laughed.
“I don’t want to minimize my primary,” Barbara went on. “It was rough and when I won, I had to face Ronald Reagan’s assistant for public liaison, Linda Chavez, in the election for senator. We went earring to earring.”
What she didn’t say, being smart and discreet, is that Chavez had attacked Barbara for being a “San Francisco-style, George McGovern liberal” who hung out with an “anti-male… radical feminist” friend.
Talk about the perversion of the art of tough. Tough doesn’t mean this kind of stuff. No, in this kind of situation, being tough means you don’t respond to your opponent’s garbage by slinging it back even harder.
So Barbara took the high road. She never responded to these nasty innuendos or tried to defend herself. Barbara campaigned strictly as a fighting populist from Baltimore, and it paid off. She beat Chavez with 61 percent of the vote. In addition, anyone who knows Barbara knows she’s no anti-male radical feminist. They know instead how collegial she is with male colleagues, often calling them “Sir Galahads.” When Barbara tutors new female senators, she always teaches us that coalition building is the name of the game.
You have to love her. She has a wonderful sense of humor and a great way with words. One of my Mikulski favorites is: “It’s not about macroeconomics, it’s about macaroni and cheese economics.” Another: When former senator from Massachusetts Scott Brown tried to make a comeback race for the Senate in 2014 after he lost his seat to that fighter for the middle class Elizabeth Warren in 2012, he decided to run against the marvelous Senator Jeanne Shaheen from New Hampshire. Barbara said: “The constitution says that every state is entitled to two senators, not that every senator is entitled to two states.” I’ve always felt that Jeanne would have won by an even bigger margin if she’d used that more.
Later, when Barbara worked until exhaustion on a huge 2015 appropriations bill, which had things in it she knew would cause fallout, Barbara said: “I made them swallow a porcupine and then I had to swallow one too.”
To me, Barbara is what it should be all about, a senator who fights for the people, a woman who helps other women, and a negotiator who gets almost everything she wants. When she announced that she would not be running for re-election in 2016, joining me in that decision, I wrote a rhyme in her honor. This jingle has no particular melody, just words.
Ode to the Women’s Dean
Before Mikulski won the day
A guy would have to pass away
And then his wife would take his place
Finally a woman in a senate space
But Barb she got there in her own right
First Democratic gal to win that fight
She won the race and joined the misters
But finally NOW she has nineteen sisters!
After my encouraging meeting with Barbara—who by the way is one of the few senators I can literally see eye to eye with, due to our both standing barely five feet tall—I told my husband, Stewart, about her words of wisdom.
“Good advice. And what’s the worst thing that can happen?” he said. “If you lose, you’ll come home to California,” and we looked at each other with great big smiles. Actually, we laughed out loud.
We decided to take an overnight retreat at a small rustic hotel in Sonoma with my strong supporters and friends to discuss the Senate bid.
There were about ten of us, including Congressman George Miller and his wife, Cynthia, and my former boss John Burton, whose passion for politics and those without a voice was infectious. Rooting us on from New York were our childhood friends Gloria and Paul Littman, who have never left my side. I would have loved to have our two savvy grownup children there, but Doug, who had graduated from the University of San Francisco Law School, was being overworked at his first lawyer job at Hanson, Bridgett and Marcus, while Nicole, having graduated from the New York University film school, was similarly engrossed in working as a production assistant on her first films, the uplifting Rudy and the dark comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer with Mike Myers.
In any case, the talk turned quickly to whether or not I should run for the Senate. We discussed the opportunity. Should I run for the retiring Alan Cranston’s six-year seat or go for the two-year seat being vacated by Republican Pete Wilson? This was an easy decision for our group. Running for a two-year seat would mean raising enough money to run in 1992 and again in 1994, an exhausting task. I had to go for the six-year Cranston seat.
We knew through the grapevine that Dianne Feinstein was willing to run for the old Wilson seat. I don’t know all of her thinking, but I do believe her team thought the appointed incumbent, John Seymour, a former state senator and the chosen candidate to run for the rest of Wilson’s term, wouldn’t be that difficult to beat. They were right. Although Wilson beat Dianne for governor in 1990, she turned around in 1992 and replaced his hand-picked successor, beating him by a whopping sixteen-point margin.
We also talked about Gingrich, and his slimy creep of destructive influence on my beloved House. All agreed it would only get worse.
And, of course, I brought up Barbara Mikulski, my role model, who was being so supportive and encouraging and who laid out a path to victory in the primary.
We were very clear-eyed about the size of the mountain to climb. We knew what we faced in the primary and then in the general election against a Republican. California was far from a blue state at that time. There was agreement on the enormity of the challenge, but then George summed it up for the group this way:
“If this were a horse race, our horse would be the long shot. But I believe she can go the distance.”
No more comments after that. There was a consensus.
I would continue to move toward that Senate run.
Okay. I was somewhat well known in the San Francisco Bay Area, active in local politics since the early 1970s and elected twice to the Marin County Board of Supervisors and five times by my district to the House. But I was a complete unknown in southern California, where most of the people lived.
Luckily for me, I had developed a warm friendship with two couples from Los Angeles who dedicated themselves to my campaign: songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman and businessman Sim Farar and his educator wife, Debbie. So I jumped right in to start campaigning on issues like reproductive choice, equal rights, environmental protection, health care, sensible gun laws, reducing military spending, and digging out of the recession.
But campaigning for the Senate in a state as big as California, which is larger than many entire countries, has to qualify as one of life’s most abnormal experiences. Campaigning felt like it had been designed to be a living hell, a way to make sure the winner will be tough enough never to crack under pressure in the job itself. This first senatorial campaign turned out to be a supreme test of my ability to sustain the art of tough.
And I almost failed the test.
I had to continue as an active member of the House of Representatives, flying back and forth to Washington, D.C., most weeks. Every time I was late or missed a critical vote, my opponents gloated publicly at the failure. Every time I couldn’t stay in California and campaign, my staff and supporters would be upset with me. The red-eye overnight transcontinental flights ruled and I developed a case of permanent jet lag. Friends and family asked how I was coping with that.
“My body feels like it is in the middle of the country at all times,” I’d say.
I had to raise money, and lots of it. Sometimes I felt like I’d choke if I had to ask one more person for a donation. But my chief fund-raisers, Suone Cotner and Nancy Kirschner, made it very (very) clear that I had to sit down in our Los Angeles campaign headquarters three or four times a week and start “dialing for dollars.” I hated it! I could do it for other candidates and causes I believe in, but getting on my knees and begging for myself… Ugh! The scope of this was way different from any of my previous campaigns. Thousands of dollars a day had to be raised.
But I had to do it, so I came up with a slant on President George Herbert Walker Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light,” the name of a very successful charity that he had promoted in both his 1989 inaugural address and 1991 State of the Union address. I started a program we called “A Thousand Points of Loot,” representing a thousand parties that each raise a thousand dollars to get us to our first one million dollars.
It worked.
We scheduled close to a thousand small events with the goal of raising a thousand dollars at each one.
“If you want to have one couple over for a gourmet dinner and charge them five hundred dollars each, that’s fine,” I said. “Or you can have a hundred people at a beach party for ten dollars a person. That’s fine too.”
This program was wildly successful. Since I couldn’t go to all those parties, my friend Pat Mitchell, who eventually became the CEO of PBS, produced a wonderful video that was essentially an uplifting infomercial. It was a collage of my years in politics, on the stump, at meetings, with kids, seniors—all shot in California’s beautiful environment. All with me, just looking at the camera and speaking ad lib. All with a convincing announcer whose mission was to tell everyone watching how high the stakes were.
And they were exceedingly high. The Cranston seat had been a progressive one for twenty-four years. That tradition could be won or lost in this Senate election. The video had drama, forward momentum, and a sense of urgency. We used it over and over again at these house parties, which were in locations far and wide. At each event we also sold our famous “Boxer shorts,” which were, well… boxer shorts—underwear. But they were one of a kind, made of heavy black cotton with a pattern of the words “Boxer for Senate.” They were actually so ugly they were almost cute. And they were a big hit. We actually sold thousands of them for about twelve dollars each.
Another favorite was my Boxer nightshirt—a long T-shirt with the words “Boxer for Senate: You’ll sleep better at night.”
Sometimes I would phone in to the larger events on the speakerphone and recruit the attendees to put on their own parties. We asked hosts to display all the different merchandise on a clothesline. Item by item, the goods were sold, and it all added up.
It was working and it was fun. It was different. No contribution was too small. I was flying beneath the radar and Leo and Mel didn’t seem to notice I was gaining on them. The Mikulski strategy of “covert operations” was working.
Then in March of 1991 came the “march of the Congresswomen” to protest the treatment of Anita Hill; that too gave my campaign a boost.
But I had to deal with an often adversarial press that kept hammering on questions about “how can you possibly win?” despite my best efforts to stick to the big issues at every appearance and press conference. Then Leo and Mel, though still ahead of me in the polls, began bombarding me with expensive and inaccurate negative ads about the House Bank scandal.
Ah, the House Bank scandal. Here’s the true story of this not-so-scandalous brouhaha in a nutshell. It was early 1992 and in those days the House Bank took five days to post members’ paychecks. Unfortunately, we members of the House didn’t know that. Therefore many members, including me, would write checks thinking the funds were in the account when they actually weren’t. No checks ever bounced. Essentially the House Bank gave you overdraft protection, without charge and without any notice. What great friends they were!
When the “scandal” broke, every member was investigated by the FBI. Oh my God! There they were—two FBI officers, in a then-secret location (actually my tiny D.C. headquarters on Capitol Hill), who were both kind of embarrassed, asking me about my checking account. All I could think about during their questioning was how many con men and murderers were getting away without being investigated, as not one but two agents bore down on me.
Soon after they “interviewed” me, I received a letter of clearance. I was exonerated. But not in the minds of the press or my two opponents. The press demanded to see my checks. I remember telling them they had no right to see how much I spent at the cleaners or in the grocery store. They were incensed at my attempt to retain some personal privacy and got even more hostile. One of my opponents’ campaign commercials showed me bouncing all over the screen.
Pretty good. Subtle.
The nastiness of the attacks increased exponentially. And the press was still convinced that I had no chance, no business being in the race at all. At the same time, Dianne Feinstein, who was running for the two-year seat, had been a popular and successful mayor for San Francisco after the horrible assassination of Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk by a crazed former city supervisor, Dan White.
“Boxer no, Feinstein yes,” the press figured, but in addition the question was raised more than once: “How can two Jewish women be elected from California in one election?”
Dianne and I had totally different supporters in the Democratic Party and very different styles, but I’ll never forget how she threw her enthusiastic support my way when I was struggling and my poll numbers were moving in the wrong direction due to the effective attacks aimed at me.
“Let’s campaign together!” she said.
From then on whenever she spoke at rallies and campaign conferences, she’d say, “Two percent may be fine for the fat content of milk, but it is not fine that only two percent of the senators are women.”
Everyone loved it.
And when I was asked how California would send two Jewish women to Washington, I answered, “It’s just what the Senate needs, a double dose of chicken soup.”
Privately, however, it made me mad that no one ever thought it was a problem to elect two Protestant men.
With the negativity I was facing every day—awful ads against me on TV and in newspapers, bumper stickers that read “Barbara Bouncer,” with all the embarrassment that comes with people thinking your checkbook is a mess—coming home to California permanently was looking better and better to me. One day in March of 1992, I phoned Stew and told him I wanted out.
“I’m quitting,” I said. “I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I’m dropping out of the race.”
All this three months before the primary election.
I was surprised when he didn’t respond with enthusiasm, since he’d been worried about the incredible stress and all the aggravation. I thought he’d encourage me to quit right away, but he didn’t.
“Let’s talk about it when you get home,” he said.
Okay. I had just one more stop to make before I could see him—a Democratic Party dinner for women to watch an episode of 60 Minutes that had been filmed weeks before. The show focused on two female senatorial candidates—Geraldine Ferraro and me. They had a great film clip I could hardly recognize of me campaigning months ago, when I was eager and full of enthusiastic energy.
All the women watching the show with me were ecstatic.
“Barbara,” one said, “we’re so proud of you for your courage!” Little did they know that my courage was suffering from a severe malady: the loss of tough.
“Thank you,” I said and left, finally pulling into my driveway at about ten p.m. I was surprised to find my kids, Doug and Nicole, waiting for me. Their father must have called them over from San Francisco, where they both had apartments.
“Where’s your dad?” I asked.
“I’m watching a ball game,” Stew’s voice came from upstairs. “Go ahead and start without me.”
“Sit down, Mom,” Nicole said.
Doug handed me a book by Dr. Seuss, one of our family’s favorite authors, called Oh, the Places You’ll Go. I must have read them Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish thousands of times as they were growing up.
“Read it aloud, Mom,” Doug said. “And think about what it’s telling you.”
I smiled. All those years I had read to them and now they wanted me to read again. So I began. It was about the ups and down of life—in poetry, of course. It was about the wonders of life—“great sights… high heights…” that are possible. Then, as I read aloud, the scene changed to the downside, the disappointments that happen to everyone.
I paused at this.
“Mom,” Nicole said, “this election isn’t about you. There’s no way you can drop out. What will that tell the world about women? That we can’t take the heat? That we let the polls and the press push us out?”
I was deeply moved as she went on.
“You may not win, Mom,” she said, “but you can’t drop out. If people see you hanging in there despite all the stress and opposition, they’ll relate to you. We all have to fight sometime in our lives. They need to see your grit. They need to know you’re fighting for them and their kids. But, Mom, you have to start by fighting for yourself.”
“It’s only ninety days to the primary,” Doug said. “Just give it all you have and see what happens. You can’t quit.”
Out of the mouths of babes. Doug at twenty-seven and Nicole at twenty-five were smart young adults who knew me so well… and I knew they were right. I had to continue, no matter how crazy it was. The great 60 Minutes show, my devoted, hard-working staff, everything Nicole had said about women counting on me—I had to dig deeper. So what if none of the pundits thought I could win. When was the last time I listened to them anyway?
As I reflect back at this extraordinary moment in my life, when my children acted like adults while I acted like a child, I also know that it isn’t easy being the child of someone who holds a national office. My kids tell me they take the heat when I take a controversial stand. They are often asked to explain my positions, which aren’t always theirs, and worst of all, a child of a politician is often compared to either an idealized version of their parent by fans or a dumber than dumb version by detractors.
The baseball game ended and Stew came downstairs.
“The kids are keeping me in the race,” I told him, certain he’d planned all this with them and knew what would happen.
“It’s only three more months,” was all he said, but from that night on, he took time off from his busy law practice and traveled with me more.
Meanwhile, the negative spots continued to run. One night we fell asleep with the TV on and I suddenly sat up straight in bed, frightened as a booming voice on one of my opponents’ commercials was attacking me.
Stew woke up too, looking alarmed.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “But, God, we can’t ever get away from this!”
We couldn’t yet start our TV commercials because we didn’t have the funds to run them until just ten days before the election. My opponents had way deeper pockets. After all, they were favored to beat me, so the smart money went to them in droves.
But the campaign had beautiful moments too. People sent in small contributions, saying, “We believe in you.” Thousands of supporters bought my yellow-and-black “Boxer shorts” at house parties. Schoolchildren wanted to hold my hand. Seniors in nursing homes never wanted me to leave. People with AIDS urged me to keep fighting on for a cure. Small-business people wanted me to help them recover from the recession. Veterans needed me too, as they were a large percentage of the homeless population in our California cities.
They were all looking for me to do something. Me—a very average human person. Maybe that’s what they saw in me and appreciated. I’m average. My mother never graduated from high school. I went to public school, from kindergarten through college. I worked to put my husband through law school. I had trouble finding childcare for my kids. I cleaned house, I shopped, I cooked. My checkbook was imperfect and so were my closets. If I could do it, they could do it.
Those were the thoughts and images in my mind every night when I crawled into bed with sore feet and a voice that croaked like a frog.
Lights out.
Then it’s six-thirty a.m., and “oh, the places I had to go!”
Doug and Nicole were right. I won the primary election and became the official Democratic Party nominee, with a good lead at the polls when the campaign began.
I wanted the election to be a debate about the issues, but my Republican opponent, conservative TV talk show commentator Bruce Herschensohn, felt differently. It was attack after attack. I was a “selfish, out-of-touch politician.”
Meanwhile, I had a great message on the heels of the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas debacle. The Senate voted to confirm Clarence Thomas in October 1991 and it was fresh in everybody’s mind; the look of the Senate was in their minds too. People saw with their own eyes that the Senate didn’t look like a democratic forum. It looked like a men-only country club. They were truly shocked. It seemed that nobody ever noticed before that there were ninety-eight men and only two women in the Senate.
We began to see that this was working in our favor, driving key donors to our side—Sol Price, for example, the founder of the Price Club, which is now Costco. Sol was supporting Dianne for the other Senate seat from the start. He had given me the brush-off when I went to San Diego to meet with him a few months before the Anita Hill issue broke.
“Do you really think two broads can win both seats?” he told me in his famous crusty voice. “Two Jewish broads at that?” But after he saw the reality of the “Boys’ Club” Senate, he called me back.
“Okay, Barbara. I’ll support two broads. It’s outrageous up there on Capitol Hill!”
Sol was one of a kind and when he passed away in 2009 at ninety years of age it left a real void. How many people of means call senators and ask them to raise their taxes so we can do more for kids? That was Sol. He was a super successful guy who always cared about everyone else.
“Let’s shake up the Senate by electing Barbara Boxer” and “The Senate should be about running the country, not running a country club.” That’s what we said over and over to prospective voters and donors alike.
My biggest exposure on the national stage after winning the primary was attending and speaking at the Democratic National Convention in August of 1992. Four thousand two hundred and one delegates packed New York City’s Madison Square Garden when Ann Richards, the governor of Texas, introduced the only female Democratic senator, my dear friend Barbara Mikulski, for a special speech and presentation.
Barbara wasted no time getting to the point.
“This is the Year of the Woman,” she began.
“Bill Clinton has said it’s time for a change after twelve years of Republicans in the White House, and we women agree because we are the change.
“This year we have many women candidates for the Senate who are going to be elected and join me in the Senate, bringing a new vitality… heart… spirit… a different way of doing business… a different perspective… Women in high office will never be a novelty again.”
She concluded by referring to Anita Hill without mentioning her name.
“Never again, when a woman comes forward to tell her story to a committee of the United States Senate, will she be assaulted for telling the truth… Never again!”
Then she introduced Carol Moseley Braun, the African-American candidate for the Senate from Illinois (she won that November), who spoke beautifully.
Then me.
I was exultant. We candidates weren’t at the speaker’s rostrum but had decided to speak from the middle of our state delegations, surrounded by supporters, and with our own platforms and microphone so we could be easily seen and heard. All around me placards and banners were waving that said BARBARA BOXER and ELECT WOMEN NOW. My daughter, Nicole, was close at my side and son, Doug, right next to her. What a scene.
I spoke. And thinking back now, I realize that the issues I hammered on were exactly what I’ve been doing ever since.
“Back in 1968,” I said, “I began to worry about the future of my children. So I decided to fight for my dream and haven’t stopped since…” I told the crowd that I wanted to do everything I could to fulfill the dream that built America but was now in danger. I was worried about our country’s economic security, about California’s 10 percent rate of unemployment, about why our country ranked twenty-first in world education, about the cost of my children’s college education and their grandmother’s medical care. How could middle-class people like us make ends meet?
I was also upset that the U.S. was still spending 150 billion dollars a year to defend Europe and Japan. I felt those dollars should be brought home and invested in our children, in health research, in caring for our environment and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
And I was very concerned about our government getting in the middle of our most personal decisions and planned to continue my fight to “protect a woman’s right to choose!”
There was a huge round of appreciation for that. Since we only were supposed to take a few minutes each, I got to the heart of it.
“I will stand up against anyone who will take us back to the days of darkness, whether it’s Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, or Orrin Hatch. I will fight anyone who will take us back to those dark days.
“We women candidates will crack open the doors of the United States Senate, open them wide, and start running a country, not a country club!
“Thank you.”
Wow. What a moment.
Right after the convention Nicole, Doug, Stewart, and I went to a Bill Clinton fund-raiser in East Hampton, Long Island, about two hours east of New York City on the Atlantic Ocean. There were about three hundred people there, a big fund-raiser to say farewell and good luck to Bill and Al Gore right before they went out on their mega campaign bus trip. It was absolutely great.
Liz Robbins, who organized the event, introduced me to Paul Newman, and we began what turned out to be a long association. He’d visit my office to explain the amazing charitable work he was doing, for children in particular. We admired each other’s efforts and shared a lot of views about the country’s neglected priorities. I worked with his wife, Joanne Woodward, on nuclear arms reduction and the two of them were wonderful to me, even hosting a very successful fund-raiser for me at their New York home.
After the party Doug had to get back to law school and Nicole to her job. Stew and I went back to my campaign for the Senate in California. After the experience and inspiration of the Democratic convention, I felt I just had to win, and knew it was going to be an intense fight to the finish.
Meanwhile, the state Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee assumed I could hold my lead and sent their limited dollars to support other Democrats in other races. In California’s expensive media market even a thirty-second spot cost $25,000 back then, so I couldn’t afford to go on television until right before the November election.
I had a fantastic campaign team headed by Rose Kapolczynski with my pollster Mark Mellman following every up and down tick and my TV maven Jim Margolis producing great spots. But they were all suffering mightily because we could only afford to air our good material at the last minute. So what most of the voters in the state knew about me for crucial weeks was what they heard night and day from the hostile, totally inaccurate stuff Herschensohn’s campaign was putting out.
It began to work for my opponent. I started slipping, slowly but steadily. My margin over Herschensohn shrunk to 3 percent, and was now a statistical toss-up, too close to call. My supporters were becoming extremely nervous and begged me to “go on TV. Even a short spot would help.” But we knew that was a recipe for failure. You couldn’t spend early and then go dark right before you really needed to advertise.
We finally started running our ads about three weeks before the election. The bleeding stopped and pollster Mark told us we were edging up; then Democratic political operative Bob Mulholland interrupted a Herschensohn campaign appearance holding a large poster advertising a strip club.
“Should the voters of California elect someone who travels the strip joints of Hollywood?” he shouted before being hastily escorted out.
Herschensohn was forced to admit that he’d been to a strip club with his girlfriend and another couple “once.” After that he tried to ignore the problem and keep attacking me, but despite all his efforts, he wound up spending the last few days of the campaign denying a series of related charges. Even his horrible mailer saying I was immoral because I was pro-choice wasn’t working.
We never changed our strategy and stuck to the issues in all of our commercials. I refused to comment on “strip club gate” because to me, the election wasn’t about that. It was about the stark differences between a progressive mainstream candidate and a far right extreme candidate.
On election night I won by five points. Dianne also won and was sworn in as a senator as soon as the election was certified in November. I had to wait until the expiration of Cranston’s term in January of 1993. So I joined her two months later and she became California’s senior senator and I the junior, titles we would hold forever. I never minded being junior senator to Dianne, especially when I became a senior citizen.
We’d done it. Dianne and I became the first ever all-woman Senate delegation in the history of the country. We were going to the Senate to represent the largest state in the union—joining Barbara Mikulski, who was re-elected that year, Patty Murray of Washington, and Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. The year 1992 did indeed become the Year of the Woman. We wound up with only six women in the Senate, but we had tripled our numbers. And then after she won a special election in June of 1993, we were joined by Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison.
What had become quite apparent is that in presidential election years, Democratic candidates on the ticket do much better than in non-presidential years. Democrats turn out in large numbers for presidential elections, but tend to stay home in off-year elections, a bad thing. Dianne and I were very fortunate to be running the same year as Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Bill and Al were the first Democrats to win the presidential delegates from California since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. They won because of their youth and energy, and they offered hope from a bruising recession. The enthusiasm they generated was so important for achieving a large voter turnout that helped all the rest of us on the ticket.
Clinton beat George H. W. Bush in California by fourteen points in 1992, and California has voted blue in every presidential election since then.
I won. I was the junior senator from California. Sometimes I couldn’t believe it and had to pinch myself. Me? Barbara Boxer, born Levy, a first-generation American on my mother’s side, the product of a public education from a Brooklyn kindergarten class to Brooklyn College, was now representing the huge Golden State of California in the United States Senate.
Election night was still a thrilling blur in my mind. But I did remember when my Republican opponent Bruce Herschensohn phoned our suite to concede at about two a.m., and how Marilyn Bergman, Gloria Littman, Shelley List, and I were starving and tried to order some food from room service that never arrived. We called and called, and room service swore they had sent it, but nope, nothing, no food ever came up to our suite.
Later we found out that the food had been delivered by mistake to the other new Democratic senator and big winner Dianne Feinstein’s suite, where her people were pleasantly surprised by the unexpected present from unknown friends. I don’t think they ever knew who ordered that food originally. But that was okay. Being hungry was good for us.