Craig Hudson/Sipa USA
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 15, 2023.
The first time I heard Dianne Feinstein speak in person was at the 1990 California Democratic Party Convention, which I was covering for LA Weekly. It was not a performance calculated to endear her to the largely liberal delegates there assembled.
At the time, Feinstein, then mayor of San Francisco, was seeking the Democratic nomination for governor. The incumbent governor, Republican George Deukmejian, was termed out of office, and Feinstein was part of the Democratic field running to replace him. Her chief opponent in the upcoming Democratic primary was state Attorney General John Van de Kamp, a dedicated liberal (subspecies patrician). Feinstein came to the convention chiefly to make clear her differences with the AG.
In mid-speech, she paused for a moment and then announced that, unlike Van de Kamp, she supported capital punishment. The delegates, somewhat stunned and affronted at having their beliefs so baldly rejected, booed vociferously.
Which was the whole point of Feinstein’s address. Her campaign team had cameras and mics stationed around the hall that captured this round of call and response, and in short order, Feinstein’s pronouncement and the crowd’s response was being repeatedly aired in her ads in all of the state’s media markets. The message was clear: When the libs behaved like a bunch of wusses, clinging to unpopular positions, she would unceremoniously reject those positions and own those libs.
I don’t doubt that Feinstein actually believed what she was saying then, but it was also Political Zeitgeist Chasing 101. Four years earlier, state voters had voted not to retain several Jerry Brown appointees to the state Supreme Court, chiefly because one of them—the chief justice—had voted against every death sentence that had come before the Court during her tenure. Polling at that time showed that the death penalty commanded about 80 percent support within the state. (The great in-migrations and out-migrations that were to radically change California’s demographics and politics had yet to occur.)
Feinstein went on to beat Van de Kamp in the June primary, only to lose to Republican Pete Wilson in the November general election. Two years later, she was elected to the U.S. Senate, where she has served ever since. This week, at age 89, she announced she would not seek re-election when her current term ends in 2024. Not surprisingly, her announcement has produced a host of columns and editorials praising her tenure, most focused on how she helped make it both acceptable and normal for women to hold high office. And to be sure, like her party, Feinstein has grown more liberal—in her case, moderately more liberal—during her long Senate tenure (though she’s been shaky on the question of whether she’d vote to abolish the filibuster).
“While Congressman Huffington voted against new border guards,” her ad proclaimed, “Dianne Feinstein led the fight to stop illegal immigration.”
Her most notable achievements were her bill banning assault weapons in 1994 (not renewed, alas, when it sunseted ten years later) and the nearly 7,000-page report on the CIA’s atrocious detention and interrogation practices, which she commissioned and oversaw as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014. Twelve years earlier, however, Feinstein was one of 29 Senate Democrats who joined all but one Senate Republican in voting to authorize George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Twenty-one Senate Democrats, including her fellow Californian Barbara Boxer, voted no, as, on the House side, did most California Democrats, including her fellow San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi (who actually led the opposition in the House).
From a California perspective, Feinstein’s early years in the Senate were particularly problematic. While she didn’t support Proposition 187 (the ballot measure that would have banned undocumented immigrants from receiving public services, including the right to attend K-12 schools), she did nod toward nativist sentiment that year in her Senate re-election campaign. (In 1992, she’d been elected to fill out the last two years of a Senate seat that had come open.) Her Republican challenger, Michael Huffington (the fabulously wealthy then-husband of Arianna Huffington) was one of the last soon-to-be-extinct liberal GOPniks, holding positions at which one of Difi’s campaign ads took aim. “While Congressman Huffington voted against new border guards,” her ad proclaimed, “Dianne Feinstein led the fight to stop illegal immigration.”
As the California electorate soon became much more Latino, Asian and immigrant, Feinstein changed with it. But despite her substantial achievements, there’s no question that when compared to the leading California Democrats of the past six decades—both Governors Brown, and current Gov. Newsom; Senators Cranston, Boxer, Harris and Padilla; House Democrats Burton, Waxman, Pelosi, and a number of current members; and L.A.’s 20-year Mayor Tom Bradley—Feinstein stands as the most centrist of the lot. Of her long tenure representing California in the Senate, history will note that the state moved further and faster left than she did.
