Willie Brown once called Barbara Boxer the luckiest politician in California.  She’s had an interesting strategy to cling onto power in this once-Republican state that has been trending Democratic for the past twenty years.  And she has done so by spending limited time in the jurisdiction she represents in the Senate, returning primarily when election time rolls ’round.

She won a contested Democratic primary in 1992 as the only woman running against 2 male opponents, with a primary “primary electorate [that] was 55 percent female“.  Since then, she has managed to avoid primary challenges by appeasing the left-wing interest groups which dominate her party, making it difficult for a Democrat to challenge her.  With an incumbent’s financial advantage and the Democrats’ demographic edge in this state, she has managed to survive against weak Republican challengers in years (1998, 2004) where voters tossed out few incumbents.

The media have all but ignored this career politician.  Only a handful of newspapers and other media in this huge state pick up stories which journalists would rush to cover if they involved a Republican.

• She steers money to her son through her PAC (a story only belatedly picked up the Los Angeles Times and run on a Saturday, the day when the newspaper is least read).
• She had a major meltdown on CNN, exaggerating her record on tax cuts.  Most California media ignored her on-air confusion.
• She refused to debate Carly Fiorina multiple times while the Republican agreed to.
• She dodges the media in ways that would make Sharron Angle blush.
• She refuses to release letters of diplomatic courtesy she wrote on behalf of far-left organization which delivered supplies to the families of enemy insurgents, supplies which may have ended up in the hands of those fighting our troops.
• She patronized the president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce (yet didn’t object when he called her Ma’am).
• She did object when an Army Brigadier General called her “Ma’am”

Barbara Boxer is indeed lucky.  Had these stories been more widely covered in California, she would not even enjoy the same standing in the polls as does her outgoing colleague from Wisconsin.  And Russ Feingold held “open meetings in each of the state’s 72 counties every year” during his entire Senate tenure.  Boxer hadn’t visited some regions of this state since her last campaign.

Today, let’s vote out this career politician.  She has failed California for far too long.  And it’s long past time our news media took note of it.

Call Me Madam Joe from RightChange on Vimeo.