A debut novel straight out of the blue (state)

By Anne-Marie O’Connor

Oct. 26, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

It may come as a surprise to many of her constituents, but for seven years California Sen. Barbara Boxer has been moonlighting from what she calls her “day job” -- as an elected official from the state that boasts the free world’s fifth or sixth largest economy -- to write a novel. “A Time to Run” is a for-whom-the-bell-tolls story of a liberal blue-state senator who braves the political mud wrestling in Washington for the sake of her ideals. It is, of course, co-written, with San Francisco author Mary-Rose Hayes.

In Boxer’s fictional world, a liberal California senator with views very much like hers goes to bat to defeat the Supreme Court nomination of a woman whose most conspicuous qualification for the job seems to be her conservative credentials -- a plot twist Boxer said she added a year and a half ago.

“It’s crazy, the parallels,” the Democrat said on a recent day as she whizzed across Los Angeles in a chauffeured SUV to a Hollywood party honoring her book. “It’s just remarkable that this all happened,” she said, referring to the controversial Supreme Court nomination of conservative Harriet Miers. “My book seemed to be so prescient.”

“It’s practically psychic!” Peggy Northrop, the editor of More Magazine, told Boxer when the senator pulled up at a More party to unveil the book. “It’s so ... prescient.”

“Maybe if the whole political thing doesn’t work out you could open a business, Barbara -- psychic extraordinaire,” actress Mary Steenburgen, who hosted the party with her husband, former “Cheers” star Ted Danson, told a roomful of Hollywood backers whose fundraising has floated a succession of “blue state” candidates.

As Boxer says, “A Time to Run” is “written out of a blue mind.” It comes off as an airplane read, aimed at liberals.

Some might even interpret it as a glimpse into the contemporary electoral frustrations of the Democratic Party. Former President Clinton was a master at the jigsaw puzzle of wedge votes that can turn a swing state red or blue. But no one Democrat since has been able to match the strategic acumen of President Bush’s advisor Karl Rove.

In fact, the book could almost be read as a primer on a certain pessimistic view held by some coastal Democrats, who see a far-off middle America as a conservative backwater -- one that has wrested control of the national political culture.

In “A Time to Run,” the main characters from the reigning “blue states” -- Josh from California and Ellen from equally reassuring New York -- are liberal, altruistic, sane. Their affluent families are caring and sharing.

Their red state-born buddy, Greg, is the son of an emotionally abusive Ohio hardware seller former Marine who lost his favorite son in Vietnam. The red states that Greg heads to after graduation are interchangeably dull Siberias where Greg hangs out with the menfolk, bonding over beer, football and hunting.

Josh and Ellen become Left Coast do-gooders. Greg becomes a sociopathic neoconservative journalist, the go-to guy for character assassinations conjured by a right-wing California senator. Boxer said that although she didn’t intend for the characters to represent the American political equation, “I hope people will understand the issues I raise about why people are blue or red or purple.”

Her literary intrigues are not all political: There’s also some bodice-ripping, with a love triangle between Greg, Ellen and Josh, and physical congress, tastefully suggested by euphemisms in which bodies “mesh.” There’s a whiff of scandal, too, when a youthful indiscretion comes back to haunt Josh.

“I wanted to show how this character makes this mistake in his life and it’s going to bring him down because a reporter wants to bring him down,” Boxer said. “Bill Clinton survived his scandal, but there’s a lot of people who don’t.”

Unlike Clinton -- who is the uncle of Boxer’s grandson -- “Josh made his mistake long before he was in public life,” she said. “It really raises the question: Do we want people who have never made a mistake and have lived in a bubble?”

Politics, Boxer said, “can be very uplifting or very difficult and very poisonous. There are terrible moments. You have a desire to pull the covers over your head and say, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ”

She got no argument from Danson at the gathering of wealthy Hollywood liberals in honor of Boxer. The people at this party left their day jobs long ago. Here, Armani mingled with flips-flops, Manolo Blahniks and the kind of deep midday cleavage that would be glaringly out of place in Washington.

On a tented back patio of his home, Danson told Boxer how former Democratic presidential candidate retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark called him not long ago about an Arizona congressional seat opening up. “[Clark] said ‘Do you have any interest?’ I said, ‘No, it would be my biggest nightmare,” Danson said, with a look of sincere dread. “People are afraid to run because of the press -- you,” Boxer said pointedly to the reporter at her side.

Steenburgen talked about finding antiques and collectibles for her upscale Santa Monica housewares store. “I traipse all over Europe,” she said. “We go to the Paris flea markets. You have to look to find reasonable prices. Europe’s still the best.”

“I’m going to tell the president to make you head of FEMA,” Boxer said jokingly to Steenburgen.

In a town where Geena Davis is already “Commander in Chief” -- at least on ABC -- political fact and fiction intermingle as comfortably as they seem to in Washington.

“I’m not going to run for president. I’m going to be at the sidelines, working my heart out,” Boxer told a TV entertainment crew, between photo ops with actresses Fran Drescher and Barbara Hershey, in front of a More cover on over-40 models with advice on “age-proof beauty.”

A woman in gray Armani mentioned “Commander in Chief,” and asked Boxer if she thought a woman could be president.

“Absolutely. I talked to Geena,” Boxer replied, “It’s just like in the movies, where are the female directors? There aren’t enough role models. It all starts with role models.”

Boxer does think Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) -- whose brother, Tony Rodham, was married to Boxer’s daughter Nicole -- could win a presidential election.

“Absolutely. I think she got off to a very strong start,” Boxer said on her way to the airport. But back to her novel, which Boxer said she wrote during her 10 hours of flying time each week over the past seven years.

Boxer said the novel explores “why people become liberals and conservatives. We explore the battle between liberals and conservatives at so many levels.”

And it’s not pretty. If you’re looking for an inspirational story about someone who rose above a difficult background to champion the downtrodden, forget it.

In “A Time to Run,” underprivileged Greg emerges as an opportunistic user -- an object lesson that does not seem particularly populist.

(“We wanted to give Greg a very solid blue-collar background, and Ohio just seemed to be a good place for somebody like Greg to be from,” said co-writer Hayes, who is the London-born author of such books as “The Winter Women.” “I do believe that that is a fact, that generally speaking, large coastal cities have a more liberal bent.”)

“It’s so clear the relationship with (Greg’s) dad and what happened to his brother in Vietnam, made a big impact on his life,” Boxer said. “The fact that [Josh and Ellen] had loving families made a very big difference.”

Greg, Boxer said, “didn’t have that inner applause you get from your family. “It’s terrible when someone with all his talent uses it to hurt people.”

That leads to the press, and its symbiotic relationship with Washington’s culture of political scandal.

“My own view of the press is you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them,” Boxer said. “When the press is a watchdog they save the country. But when the press is focused on the personal, they don’t lift us up at all.”

Greg, she said, is “symbolic of some of what’s happened to journalism -- certainly not all.”

The character who seems closest to home is Ellen Fischer, the liberal senator in the novel who opposes the conservative Supreme Court nominee. Boxer says the character is not based on her, “but I would say her point of view is very much my point of view.”

Like Boxer, Ellen is petite but formidable. She is swathed in a politically correct cocoon peopled by characters whose ethnicities are signaled by names like Talitha and Derelle. Ellen is more of a Pollyanna than Boxer: Her turn through 1960s Berkeley is so squeaky clean she comes off as a Sandra Dee in tie-dye.

Like Boxer, Sen. Ellen Fischer is trying to put the kibosh on a nomination; in this case, of a conservative California Latina law professor who she believes would not support abortion rights on the Supreme Court.

And here is where the fiction seems less prescience than autobiography.

When Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, Boxer helped jump-start the hearings on his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill. As the lead interrogator at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearings, Boxer questioned her “respect for the truth.”

Boxer said she believes the Republicans purposefully nominate women and minorities to camouflage policies that undermine their interests.

“I think it’s a tactic and a strategy to confuse the real agenda, which is certainly not seeing the government as a force to give opportunity to women and minorities,” Boxer said. “This is not what the right wing believes government should be doing. So if they put up a woman or a minority they think that that will sort of cover up their real hidden agenda.”

Boxer’s willingness to take on issues like sexual harassment and abortion rights has filled her campaign coffers with checks from women around the country since she was elected to the House in 1983 and the Senate in 1993. She has grown to relish her reputation as a flamethrower of the left, and here is where “A Time to Run” could be interpreted as a sort of literary “Kumbaya.”

Boxer said her favorite response to her novel, from “Kirkus Review,” “said it would make the blue states happy and the red states mad, something like that.”

Never mind that 45% of California voters -- 5.5 million people -- went with Bush in 2004, or that “blue” California launched Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What “Kirkus Review” actually said about a “A Time to Run” was: “Short on subtlety and insider dish, this political page-turner will nevertheless rally the blue and annoy the red.”

“There are a lot of blue voters in red states, and a lot of red voters in blue states,” Boxer allowed, as the SUV neared the airport.

Now that’s prescient.