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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 byDavid Cohen;
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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.
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P.O. Not one word about Feinstein Iraq War vote.
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
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DiFi, Breaking Into the Boys’ Club
Maureen Dowd
WASHINGTON — I’ve always said that the Washington Monument is an apt symbol, a Freudian obelisk redolent of all the male egos that have shaped our capital.
To appreciate what Dianne Feinstein accomplished, you need to know how male this city was in 1992, when she was swept into Congress in the “Year of the Woman” as the 18th female senator in history.
That wave was buoyed by women’s anger at the vicious Republicans and inept Democrats on the white male Judiciary Committee overseeing the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. A sexual harasser lied his way onto the Supreme Court, and now he is doing his best to corrupt it.
These women arrived on the Hill, home to historic man caves, as the journalist Jackie Calmes called the hideaways where male pols horse-traded, sipped whisky and played poker. When one new lawmaker stepped into the House elevator, the female operator said icily, “This elevator is for members only.”
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Several years ago, Senator Feinstein invited me to her house one evening for a drink. I was very excited. I’d watched male columnists play golf with presidents and go drinking with male lawmakers for a long time, and now at last I was going to be ushered into an inner sanctum.
The very proper senator sat with a small dog on her lap in her elegant living room as we had a glass of wine. She didn’t want to spin me on anything or break news. She just wanted to chat. It turned out that DiFi, as she was known, regularly organized dinners with female journalists and mentored women in Congress; she often said that Washington could be a lonely, hard and mean place, especially for women breaking barriers.
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P.O. Not one word about Feinstein Iraq War vote.
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
3:
Dianne Feinstein, the ‘Lioness of the US Senate,’ has died
ByCorine Lesnes (San Francisco (United States) correspondent)
P.O. After Ted Kennedy Death, he was dubbed ‘The Lion of the Senate’, its not a honorific, but an expression of political kitsch!
This historic figure of the Democratic Party and dean of the US Senate died on Thursday, at the age of 90. In 1978, she became the first woman to become mayor of San Francisco, before serving as a California senator for over 30 years.
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A few hours before her death, after a final vote shortly before 2 pm, she had received her former colleague Jane Harman, elected like her in 1992, known as ‘the year of women’ due to the number of women entering Congress. An emotional Harman showed what is probably the last photo of the California senator. She is seen standing, thinner, but with glasses in hand and adorned with her customary string of pearls: at work. On Friday morning, a bouquet of white roses was placed on her desk in the Senate. “We look at that desk and we know what we’ve lost,” said Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the upper chamber, her colleague of 30 years. “Today, there are 25 women serving in this chamber,” he said. “And every one of them would admit they stand on Dianne’s shoulders.”
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P.O. Jane Harman was a notorious Neo-Con War Monger, ‘the year of women’ proved that Women, can be as corrupt and malfeasant as any man. Note that Feinstein had to be coached to say ‘ay’ to a vote, in her finale days. The Reader is rewarded in the remainder of this Funeral Oration chock-a-block with personal/political melodrama. Not one mention of :
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
Political Observer
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