A passing exchange during a Senate hearing on Thursday turned into a political flash point as Sen. Barbara Boxer and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused one another of insensitivity in comments about motherhood and the war in Iraq.
In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Rice suggested that Boxer (D-Calif.) had set back feminism by suggesting during the hearing that the childless Rice had paid no price in the Iraq war.
“I thought it was OK to be single,” Rice said. “I thought it was OK to not have children.”
At the Thursday hearing, Boxer told Rice: “Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families.”
Boxer said in an interview Friday that her comments were being turned against her by the White House and other Republicans. “My whole point was to focus on the military families who pay the price,” she said.
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The exchange between Boxer and Rice came during a hostile Senate hearing in which Rice, seeking to sell President Bush’s new Iraq plan to a skeptical Congress, faced an almost solid wall of opposition from Democrats and many Republicans. Boxer several times repeated the question, “Who pays the price?”
White House spokesman Tony Snow suggested earlier Friday that Boxer’s comments were anti-feminist.
“I don’t know if she was intentionally tacky,” Snow said in an interview on Fox News. “It’s a great leap backward for feminism.”
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 the “Womb Wars.”
Some Democratic Senate staffers said Boxer’s exchange with Rice allowed the Bush administration to turn the tables on Iraq critics and sidestep the almost uniform opposition to the president’s plan to send more soldiers to Iraq.