From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…

SHADOW BOXER

Barbara Boxer is taking on an even tougher opponent than Carly Fiorina — and that’s public skepticism that the Obama "stimulus" has been a net job creator.

On Tuesday, Ms. Boxer launched a two-day, nine-stop tour of California to promote the stimulus and take aim at Ms. Fiorina, a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, whom she accused of laying off 30,000 workers, sending jobs to China and making a "fortune for herself." Ms. Boxer contrasts this with her own alleged accomplishments as a job creator, notably with her vote for last year’s controversial $862 billion stimulus package. At a highway construction site near San Francisco, where the work is partly funded by federal tax dollars, she gestured at the workers around her and declared that if Ms. Fiorina had been in the senate, "the Economic Recovery Act would not have passed. And these people would not have their jobs."

Her story, however, began to get a little ragged at another stop, a lithium-ion battery plant in Los Angeles, where Ms. Boxer ducked a question about why, if the stimulus was so successful, California’s unemployment rate is higher than it was a year ago. "We are a long way from where we have to be," she answered weakly. Then the president of the battery company was left to correct the record on another point: The 100 jobs the plant added in the last year were unrelated to the stimulus.

Though President Obama remains popular in California, with a nearly 60% approval rating, Ms. Boxer is much less so. Her approval rating hasn’t budged much over 40 despite two recent visits by the president to raise money and campaign for her. While polls show her still leading Ms. Fiorina by four points, Ms. Boxer faces a new onslaught of GOP ads linking her left-wing environmental stands to the 40% unemployment in some parts of the Central Valley. Ms. Boxer will get fresh help today from Vice President Joe Biden, who has been on his own stimulus-promoting tour of California. But both face a tall order — somehow trying to make lemonade out of California’s 12.4% unemployment rate.

— Allysia Finley

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.