DIANNE FEINSTEIN, R.I.P.: Remembering A Time When American Politics Worked - by Allan Brownfeld

[Salon] DIANNE FEINSTEIN, R.I.P.: Remembering A Time When American Politics Worked - DIANNE FEINSTEIN, R.I.P.: Remembering A Time When American Politics Worked By Allan C. Brownfeld ——————————————————————————————————————————- The death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein has taken from us a political leader whose career reminds us that there was a time when American politics worked, when Republicans and Democrats did not view one another as “enemies” but as common participants in the enterprise of democracy. I remember that time and worked in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives for a number of years. At one time, I was assistant to the research director of the House Republican Conference. Members of that committee included two future presidents, George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford. Rather than viewing Democrats as “enemies,” they worked tirelessly to convince them to support legislation they were developing. Jerry Roberts, former managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of “Dianne Feinstein: Never Let Them See You Cry,” notes that, “In political time, her demise seems far more than the end of a mere era—-more like the passing of an eon. As politician, policymaker and uncommonly private public figure, Feinstein for six decades modeled attitudes, behavior and values that have become increasingly rare. Reliably favoring civility over churlishness, she preferred independent judgment to ideology, pragmatism to partisanship, problem-solving to power-seeking.” The Washington Post points out that, “Mrs. Feinstein spent much of her career fielding criticism from opposite ends of the political spectrum. She disappointed liberals with her law-and-order approach toward governance and her long-standing support for the death penalty, even as she frustrated conservatives with her support for gun control and same-sex marriage. While some women celebrated Mrs. Feinstein as a trailblazer, others resented what they considered her insufficient attention to women’s issues.” Dianne Feinstein’s centrism goes back to the earliest days of her political career. Her elevation to the office of mayor of San Francisco came in the midst of increasing tension and radicalism in San Francisco. Many of those involved in the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana on the part of cult leader Jim Jones,were from San Francisco. During this time, the New World Liberation Front terrorist group placed a bomb outside the bedroom window of Feinstein’s daughter. For a time, Feinstein owned a handgun. Her biographer Jerry Roberts says that, The lesson Dianne took from this craziness was that she had been right—-that all this polarization and bitterness that was extant in the town had now led to these murders,”referring to the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. “That’s when she started talking about how the center is so important.” She became mayor of San Francisco in the wake of these assassinations. Sen.Feinstein pursued a deal to prevent Iran from building nuclear arms “more intently than any other colleagues,” writes Connie Bruck in the New Yorker. “After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of CongressIn hopes of averting a possible agreement, Feinstein appeared on Meet the Press and said, ‘What Prime Minister Netanyahu did here was something no ally of the United States would have done.’ When I saw her the next day, she told me, ‘For Netanyahu to come here with a clear view of preventing an agreement was really inappropriate, particularly because this president’s administration has provided more than $25 billion to Israel, far more than to any other country.” When she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, her support for the intelligence community made especially explosive the investigation she led into the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA against terrorism suspects after the Sept.11, 2001 attacks. She was deeply disturbed by testimony to the committee about secret CIA prisons known as “black sites. The committee’s 6,700 page report alleged that CIA interrogation techniques had been far more brutal, more widespread and less effective than the agency previously claimed. Then-CIA Director John Brennan insisted that the interrogation techniques “did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” Sen. Feinstein gave a dramatic speech on the Senate floor in which she accused the CIA of improperly searching computers used by her staff members and seeking to intimidate them with calls for a Justice Department review of their conduct. An internal CIA investigation later supported those claims and Brennan apologized. When her committee’s torture report was issued, Sen Feinstein declared that, “History will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law, and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.’” Sen. Feinstein served on the Appropriations Committee and chaired the Rules Committee. Among her accomplishments was the California Desert Protection Act, the 1994 law that created Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks and the Mojave National Preserve. The vote that she most regretted, she said, was her support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Sen Feinstein was so popular across. Party lines that former Secretary of State George Shultz, a Republican, raised money for Feinstein’s campaigns from Republican friends in California. He said that, “Dianne Feinstein is not really bipartisan so much as nonpartisan.” Sen. Feinstein often reflected on the fact that her course had been set by the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. She once told the New York Times that for years she could not bring herself to sit in the chair where Moscone had been shot, but neither could she remove it from the mayor’s office. Reflecting on her life, Feinstein once said that, “I think that one of the most positive qualities any individual can have is what I call the Phoenix syndrome, the mystical bird that became the symbol of rising from your own ashes. That’s the challenge of life. You’ve got to recover from your own ashes , many, many times.” Our political life in recent years was difficult for people like Dianne Feinstein. Upon her death, she was hailed as a good friend by both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. That’s the kind of U.S.Senate I remember. That’s the kind of America which won World War ll and the Cold War. That’s the kind of America which ended segregation and advanced civil rights. That’s the kind of America in which Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could be friends. Let us hope that kind of America re-emerges. Our future depends upon it.