Political Observer comments.
Headline: A look at the legacy of Dianne Feinstein
Sub-headline: Before her long stint in the Senate, she led San Francisco through a healing period after horrific political violence.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/dianne-feinstein-senator-mayor-00006007
Some excerpts from The Politico obituary:
…
She actually had come close to giving up politics in 1978, convinced she was never going to be elected mayor of San Francisco. Instead, she was thrust into the position that November when Mayor George Moscone and fellow City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay elected official, were shot to death in City Hall by a fellow politician. After that horrifying event, she would lend a healing calm to her city — and then guide it through the AIDS crisis that followed.
“She turned out to be the right leader for the time,” David Talbot wrote years later in “Season of the Witch,” a chronicle of those harrowing days.
“The hatred was so big,” Feinstein said years later, “we really had to bring the bricks of the city together again, and it was difficult.”
…
Editor: 1978 Political Melodrama doesn’t age well, but in the care and maintenance of Politico, it blossoms in to an ersatz hagiography.
The trail-blazing Feinstein
“Toughness doesn’t have to come in a pinstripe suit,”
Feinstein “got shit done by working with people on both sides of the aisle and refusing to get caught up in unnecessary nonsense,” John Burton, a former California Democratic Party chair, said when Feinstein had announced her intention to retire from the Senate on Feb. 14, 2023.
“As a woman who stormed into the male world of city and national politics when it was an actual boys’ club, she’s had to put up with more rudeness and bullying than many of us can imagine,” The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan wrote in 2019.
Progressives in California didn’t always find her sufficiently liberal, but her work ethic was widely praised. Feinstein strove to be seen as a consequential senator who passed legislation.
Editor: More Feinstein Political Melodrama:
It was Feinstein who found Milk after White had shot him five times, and it was Feinstein who desperately tried to save him.
And then it was Feinstein who went out to meet the assembled press and then announced: “Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.” Some gasped, some cried out. And Feinstein then added: “The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”
“In the course of that terrible day, Feinstein had become the leader the city needed,” Talbot wrote. “As she began to speak, she found the right words to express San Francisco’s howling pain and to make people believe that the broken city could be put back together.”
Bill Carrick, her longtime campaign consultant, said in 2023: “She basically did a really good job of keeping the city stabilized.”
“Feinstein is sometimes described as a centrist, but it is because her views are varied, not because they are mild; she thinks of herself, more accurately, as a pragmatist,” The New Yorker’s Connie Bruck wrote of her in 2015.
Feinstein also became an influential figure through her role on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Generally, she was supportive of the needs of American intelligence and the institutions themselves. She was, for instance, critical of Edward Snowden when he leaked NSA secrets and fled the country. “He has taken an oath,” Feinstein said in 2013. “These oaths mean something. If you can’t keep the oath, get out. And then do something about it in a legal way.”
For six years, she found herself at odds with the Obama administration and the CIA over her efforts to compile and release a massive report on interrogation tactics that the Bush administration adopted after 9/11. In particular, Feinstein was disturbed by the existence of “black sites,” where torture could be practiced on terror suspects far from official eyes.
“It was six years of work, it was staff that worked, you know, night and day, weekends on this,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash. “The report itself is over 7,000 pages, over 32,000 footnotes.”
Editor : On and on the careful, and selective reportage, on the political virtues of Feinstein… yet one very important aspect of her Senate tenure is missing. What of Feinstein’s vote on the Iraq War, she delayed the vote , what might her reasons have been?
Headline: War brings business to Feinstein spouse / Blum’s firms win multimillion-dollar defense contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan
By Phillip Matier, Andrew Ross April 27, 2003
When it comes to scoring mega-military-related contracts, Sen. Dianne Feinstein‘s multimillionaire husband, Richard Blum, is right in the thick of things.
First up: a contract announced last week between the Army and URS Corp., the San Francisco planning and engineering company that specializes in defense work — and that happens to be partly owned by Blum’s investment firm.
The contract — which could grow to $600 million — is to help with troop mobilization, weapons systems training and anti-terrorism methods.
That’s on top of a $3.1 billion Army contract that URS snared back in February for weapons systems and homeland defense.
Next up: Perini Corp., which qualified earlier this month for as much as $100 million of defense work in Iraq and elsewhere. The Massachusetts-based company is already busy building barracks and other facilities for the new Afghan army — a separate contract worth $28 million.
Blum’s investment firm controls about 20 percent of Perini’s shares, with the majority held by a group of investors led by company chairman Ron Tutor.
Some of Perini’s stock is also held by Tutor’s West Coast construction company, Tutor-Saliba — the firm that built the Los Angeles subway system, rebuilt the Oakland Coliseum and put BART into San Francisco International Airport.
…
Political Observer
StephenKMackSD's Blog 