Dianne Feinstein deserved better
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Dying doesn’t make anyone a saint, and despite the normal respect due to those in mourning, death isn’t an excuse to substitute an honest obituary with a hagiography. But while I will not stretch the truth to pay tribute to Dianne Feinstein, I must concede the obvious: For such a truly trailblazing public servant, the California senator deserved a better ending.
A Stanford graduate who survived an abusive mother, Feinstein was catapulted into national fame after the murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk rendered Feinstein, then the first female president of the city’s Board of Supervisors, the acting mayor. Ultimately elected twice to the job, Feinstein was indeed considered a centrist Democrat and highly effective executive, and she became the nation’s first female Jewish senator in 1992. Feinstein’s own net worth was reported to be at least $50 million and perhaps as much as $100 million, and her late husband, Richard Blum, an investment banker, left behind an estimated $1 billion.
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By 2017, Feinstein had visibly and undeniably lost more than a mere step or two. She had a pacemaker inserted in January, and Barbara Boxer, the fellow California senator who had been elected the same year as Feinstein, had decided to exit the chamber gracefully on a strong note and endorse the state’s telegenic attorney general, an angel investment in a relatively young politician who would become the first female vice president in four short years. It would have made sense for Feinstein, who was eight years older than Boxer, to follow suit.
Instead, Feinstein clung on to power, with the party machine quietly demanding that the state’s would-be rising stars stay out of the 2018 race. California’s jungle primary all but ensured that Feinstein would face off against another Democrat from the party’s further right flank, meaning that between the party faithful and the state’s Republicans, her reelection was secured. But the cracks were already coming into national view.
In the lead up to the “blue wave,” the now-infamous letter by Christine Blasey Ford accusing then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh was leaked, likely not by Feinstein, but almost surely by one of her staffers. The proceedings to confirm a mild-mannered and doctrinally centrist judge was transformed, overnight, into a national circus litigating the entire #MeToo movement with very little care for the privacy of the accuser, who never consented to going public with her allegation or the accused, who has never actually been proved to be in the same room as the accuser, let alone proven to have lain a hand on her.
And yet, up against the soon-to-be-disgraced Kevin de Leon, Feinstein won a fifth term in the world’s greatest deliberative body by more than eight points.
By 2022, the corporate press was routinely churning out allegations that Feinstein was forgetting the names of her colleagues and meetings that she had attended, and earlier this year, her hospitalization for shingles complications jeopardized her party’s razor-thin control of the Senate. After returning from her 10-week hiatus, the wheelchair-bound Feinstein insisted to bewildered voters that she had “been here,” “been voting.”
When not juggling her mounting health woes and an increasingly uncollegial Congress, Feinstein spent her final years squabbling with her family over the estate of her husband, who died in 2022. When Feinstein gave her daughter power of attorney, Blum’s trustees blasted the move in a court filing over his estate, writing, “It is unclear how Senator Feinstein — a sitting United States Senator — supposedly has the capacity to appoint a trustee, yet seemingly cannot file the petition in her own name.”
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Californians obviously deserved better than to be served by an obviously ailing Feinstein in her final years, but so did she. While workhorses such as herself would likely never be happy retiring off to a life of pure rest and restlessness, Feinstein could have (and likely should have) spent the final years of her life and her husband’s balancing book writing with her beach house, giving speeches for the donor circuit every other week rather than scurrying on the Senate floor every night.
While Feinstein must have assented on some level to working her way to the grave, she deserved a staff, support system, and family with the love and loyalty to tell her that both she and California would be better served by her stepping down from the Senate with her legacy and dignity intact, rather than subjecting her, the state, and the Senate to the sorry performance of the past half-decade. It did us no favors, but the elderly woman likely surrounded by sycophants and appeasers profiting from her power even fewer.