In an interview on Friday, Senator Boxer said her comments had been misunderstood and were now being turned against her by the White House and by Republicans. “What I was trying to do in this exchange was to find common ground with Condi Rice,” she said. “My whole point was to focus on the military families who pay the price.” Senator Boxer added: “I’m saying, she’s like me, we do not have families who are in the military. What they are doing is a really tortured way to attack a United States senator who voted against the war.”
The exchange between Senator Boxer and Ms. Rice came during a hostile Senate hearing in which Ms. Rice, seeking to sell President Bush’s new Iraq plan to a skeptical Congress, faced an almost solid wall of opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. Senator Boxer several times repeated the question, “Who pays the price?” Senator Boxer read excerpts from a radio interview with an American family who had lost a son in Iraq. “You can’t begin to imagine how you celebrate any holiday or birthday,” she said. “There’s an absence. It’s not like the person’s never been there. They always were there and now they’re not, and you’re looking at an empty hole.”
Ms. Rice replied, “I can never do anything to replace any of those lost men and women in uniform, or the diplomats, some of whom ——” Senator Boxer cut her off. “Madam Secretary, please, I know you feel terrible about it. That’s not the point. I was making the case as to who pays the price for your decisions.”
During the hearing itself, Ms. Rice did not appear to take issue with Senator Boxer’s comments. During the interview, she addressed them only in response to a question. But the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, suggested earlier on Friday that Senator Boxer’s comments were antifeminist. “I don’t know if she was intentionally tacky,” Mr. Snow said in an interview on Fox News. “It’s a great leap backward for feminism.”
A number of members of Congress have children in the military who are serving in Iraq or are likely to do so, including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Jim Webb of Virginia.
Senator Boxer’s comments and the claims and counterclaims about what she meant have captivated the blogs and received extensive coverage on Fox News and other cable channels. One blog, called Swampland, labeled it “Womb Wars.” Conservative blogs and commentators were quick to seize on the issue. “One Great Leap (Backwards) for Womankind,” read one blog, Bikini Politics. “They will be known by their Fruits,” read another, Macsmind, which billed itself as “Conservative News, Commentary and Common Sense.” Rush Limbaugh also got into the act. “Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here,” Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show. Deneen Borelli, a fellow with Project 21, which describes itself as a “leading voice in the African-American community,” said, “I am deeply appalled by Senator Barbara Boxer’s cruel and callous attack on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.” “The debate should have been about the war in Iraq and not a platform to demean Secretary Rice,” Ms. Borelli said in a statement issued by the organization.
Some Democratic Senate staffers said Senator Boxer’s exchange with Ms. Rice allowed the Bush administration to turn the tables on Iraq critics and sidestep the larger issue of the almost uniform opposition to the president’s plan to send 20,000 more American soldiers to Iraq. There was no rush from Democrats to defend Senator Boxer, although one blogger on the Swampland blog called Senator Boxer’s comments “fair, as far as it goes.” During the interview with the Times, Ms. Rice said she had expected the skepticism that she received from Congress the day before. “I’ve been through things like this before,” she said.
