"Barbara Boxer Steps into Spotlight" --good AP article!

[marions ghost]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=5&u=/ap/20050129/ap_on_go_co/barbara_boxer

Sen. Barbara Boxer Steps Into Spotlight
January 29, 2005 5:32 PM EST

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barbara Boxer has always spoken up, but the California Democrat seems to have gotten a lot louder lately. Her opposition to Condoleezza Rice's secretary of state nomination was so combative that it was parodied on Saturday Night Live. That came on the heels of her decision to sign onto a House member's complaint about Ohio voting problems, forcing Congress to debate them before certifying President Bush's re-election victory.

She's being touted on liberal blogs as the Democrats' best hope for president in 2008. Conservatives are excoriating her as - in House Minority Leader Tom DeLay's phrase - the leader of the "'X-Files' wing" of the Democratic Party.

But Boxer says she is just standing up for what she believes.

"I've always been this way," she says, "and I'm trying to figure out exactly why people suddenly find this to be interesting, you know. Somehow I have touched something inside people, and I have not ever had this happen before. The only thing I can think, after reading what people said, is a feeling that I'm asking the kind of questions and saying the kind of things that they are feeling."

Maybe she's becoming a spokeswoman, or even a symbol, for voters who oppose the Iraq war or feel shut out by the Bush administration. Maybe, with the Democratic Party at sea after November's election losses, some people sense a leadership void and are looking to her to fill it.

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