Barbara Boxer was today’s lunchtime speaker at YKC 06. The junior senator from California was introduced as “the model of what the netroots wants,” owing to her liberal voting record and her position on the Iraq war. (She was one of 23 senators who voted against giving the president the go-ahead.)
The speech was rousing enough. The White House is “dangerously incompetent,” and congress is “too eager to write the president a blank check and turn a blind eye,” leaving an accountability void that bloggers and their readers have stepped in to fill. “You are the most powerful answer to [executive overreach].”
Boxer was good on the GOP’s sudden rediscovery of that preeminent threat to American values, the liberal-homosexual war on marriage–“if you really want to do something for marriage, raise the minimum wage, provide people with health-care”–and on the question of whether it’s worth Democrats’ time to push for George W. Bush’s impeachment: not. Republicans control congress, so the idea wouldn’t go anywhere; and anyway, the American people would view it as an unhelpful distraction from important issues. “There’s only one thing to do,” she said. “Change the Congress.” Fair enough.
