“This race presents one of the clearest choices in the nation,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer in her closing statement during her radio debate today with Republican senate candidate Carly Fiorina. Boxer’s words reflected the radically different viewpoints she and Fiorina hold on how to solve the nation’s pressing problems. During the debate, the moderators — Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison and La Opinion Metro editor Gabriel Lerner — asked the candidates about a range of issues: job creation, the environment, the national debt, federal spending, abortion, immigration, and health care. In the answers, the candidates forcefully and clearly presented their different ideologies — and the harm they believed their opponent’s policies would cause to California.

Fiorina spoke about how government was destroying jobs. She attacked excessive regulation as “costing us jobs,” and recounted how endangered species regulatory policies were prevent California’s Central Valley from getting the water its farmers needed. “Tens of thousands of people at the height of it were out of work,” Fiorina charged.

But Boxer argued that it was thanks to government intervention that the economic situation was not even worse. “I voted for [the stimulus]. It is creating jobs,” said Boxer. She attacked Fiorina for supporting “tax breaks for companies who ship jobs overseas,” and reminded listeners that Fiorina, as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, had laid off 30,000 workers, moving the jobs overseas. Boxer also declared her support for collective bargaining and the recent $10 billion bill that prevented teacher layoffs.

Questions about how to reduce federal spending were answered with entirely different proposals. Boxer wants to end the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, collect payments from contractors who owe the government, and cut tax breaks for the rich — moves that she estimates could raise up to $3 trillion in total. Saying “let’s institute a spending cap in Washington, D.C.,” Fiorina proposed a different set of initiatives: returning federal spending to 2008 levels, freezing government pay, and reducing hiring of federal workers. She also wanted to give every American the ability to designate 10 percent of their tax dollars to go to paying off the debt.

On immigration, Fiorina argued that the first priority should be securing the border. Calling it “increasingly a national security problem,” Fiorina complained that “people are playing politics with it.” She spoke about the need for “a temporary worker program that works in this state.” Pushed by Morrison about what she would address the problem of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently living in the country, Fiorina replied that problem with Washington was how “we always skip over the problem that’s right in front of us and talk about something else.”

Boxer stressed the urgency of “comprehensive immigration reform,” and talked about putting immigrants “on a path to legality.” She attacked Fiorina for putting border security above everything else. “If you follow her thinking, they [illegal immigrants] will all have to be deported,” Boxer said, although she acknowledged the importance of securing the border. And she defended her vote against a 2007 temporary guest worker bill, quoting a newspaper’s description of the bill as proposing “indentured servitude” for the workers.

When environmental issues were brought up, Boxer touted her endorsement from the Sierra Club and spoke about her work as chairman of the Senate environment committee. Speaking about the environment, Boxer bluntly said, “The fact is, we have to act,” and blamed Big Oil and coal companies for cap-and-trade’s legislative failure. Fiorina noted that Boxer had received significant donations from environmental groups, and asked if Boxer was serving Californians or special interests with her environmental initiatives. She decried cap-and-trade as being “the most expensive piece of legislation in U.S. history,” and said that global warming was a global problem, one that no state or nation acting alone could impact.

On health care, Fiorina advocated repealing Obama’s health-care plan: “We’ve created a huge host of problems and we haven’t solved the fundamental problem.” She outlined what policies could make health care more affordable and accessible, including subsidizing high-risk pools for certain patients and making the insurance market more competitive by letting people buy plans across state lines.

Boxer said that she would support legislation to add a public option to the health-care program, and argued that “most people want us to mend it [the health-care bill], not end it.” Saying that she didn’t want “to go back to the days where thousands of people died every day because they lacked health insurance,” Boxer talked about the plan’s benefits such as children being allowed to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26 and seniors receiving additional prescription drug subsidies.

The two also clashed on abortion, with Fiorina upholding her pro-life views and Boxer adamant that abortion should remain legal. Fiorina attacked Boxer, saying that her pro-abortion views were extreme, but also asserted that “the subject of this election is not abortion.” Boxer said that she did not want “to see the senate in the middle of this personal decision,” and argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would make abortion doctors and women who chose to have abortions criminals.

Ultimately, it was a debate that reflected the polarization on the national scene on how to return the country to prosperity. In California, which faces a $19 billion deficit and a 12.4 percent unemployment rate (the third highest in the country), this is an urgent question — and one that received the seriousness it deserves in today’s spirited debate.