FEINSTEIN SHOWED WHAT COULD BE DONE WITHOUT SENIORITY IN DC

My first year in Washington D.C. as a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle coincided with Dianne Feinstein’s first year in the nation’s capital as well.

A big part of my job was to cover the former mayor, and, as it turned out, Barbara Boxer, who was also from the Bay Area, and for years had represented Marin County in the House of Representatives.

Together, they offered great fodder for our reporting, especially as the first two women in American history to represent a single state in the Senate.

It was only in 1996 that that milestone was achieved elsewhere – in Maine of all places, where Susan Collins joined Senator Olympia Snowe.?? It was incremental progress at best. ??As I wrote at the time, “44 states will continue the two- century-old tradition of sending only men to represent them in Washington.”

California’s small contingent of reporters would meet in Boxer’s office in the Hart Senate building for bagels and cream cheese on a regular basis for informal conversation. Our get-togethers with Feinstein were more formal – sometimes meeting in the ornate Senate Dining Room in the Capitol.

Feinstein was always gracious, but wasn’t one for cracking jokes or indulging in too much small talk. ?My main complaint about both Boxer and Feinstein was that they frustratingly never leaked documents ?to us, or, for that matter, much significant insider information, despite us representing their hometown newspaper?

Boxer was clearly the more progressive of the two, at least by how that term is understood in the San Francisco Bay Area.? But the term “moderate” invariably used to describe Feinstein – also didn’t quite fit, especially in terms of what that meant on the national landscape.

In fact, Feinstein and Boxer, agreed on most issues, especially during those early years.

They were, for example, united in opposing the landmark welfare reform bill negotiated by President Clinton.? They were two of only 21 senators to oppose the bill.

“While we in Washington sit in our Ivory Tower, and pat ourselves on the back for ‘changing welfare as we know it,' the real impact of this bill will land on people who are too old or too sick to care for themselves, and whose families, if they have one, have no ability to help them,'' ?Feinstein said at the time.

She predicted that California would lose more than $16 billion in federal support over the following six years – or nearly one-third of the $55 billion in savings the bill's supporters say it will yield.

“It is clear that with 32 million people, no state has as much to gain or lose from welfare reform,'' Feinstein she said.? “Unfortunately, this bill remains one in which California loses, and loses big.''

During her first two years in office – a partial term resulting from the vacancy left by Pete Wilson who had been elected governor -- ?Feinstein was criticized for not taking a position on Prop. 187, the anti-immigrant initiative approved by California voters in Nov. 1994, until two weeks before the election.

Once elected to a full six year term in the Senate, she came out forcefully against Prop. 209, another incendiary California initiative banning affirmative action. “I frankly think that all the California initiative would do is throw open this very controversial area to enormous misunderstanding and perpetual litigation, and will not solve the problem at hand,” she said.

?She and Boxer agreed at times on non-progressive positions on immigration – pushing for a reduction in legal immigration, and for a tough crackdown on unauthorized migration as well. They also opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, accurately anticipating the downsides of the treaty that emerged over the succeeding decades.

Most significantly, I witnessed how Feinstein accomplished ?two of her singular victories – convincing Congress to approve the California Desert Protection act designate nine million acres of state desert as parkland, and to pass a federal ban on assault rifles.

On the assault rifle ban, she had to get around opposition from lawmakers like Sen. Sam Nunn from Georgia,? and? Colorado’s Ben Nighthorse Campbell. She did so by agreeing to exempt a class of assault rifles more clearly intended for hunting. ?At the same time, she was able to get the liberal Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, and more conservative Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz on board.

"I went member to member, phone call to phone call,'' Feinstein told my colleague Marc Sandalow at the time. “I've spent a lot of time just sitting on the (Senate) floor, just watching my colleagues, getting to know them, trying to get to know their needs as legislators.”

Said then-Sen. Joe Biden, “I thought she was naive to think she could get the votes, and I thought she underestimated the power of the National Rifle Association.” Yet “she was absolutely, totally relentless.? She just about drove me nuts.''?

?“Both measures required a combination of persistent lobbying, cajoling and compromise to succeed,” observed Thomas Mann from the Brookings Institutions, then one of the most astute observers of the Washington scene.

“If Feinstein ruled San Francisco with an imperial touch, she has come to Washington more like a pit bull,” Marc wrote in 1994 when she was up for reelection.

She also had a personal touch, belying her image as a tough taskmaster with a starch, even imperious, manner. When my daughter had to have surgery when she was three months old at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, I wrote a column for the Chronicle on the heroic work being done by doctors there. She sent me a personal note, reflecting on some similar trials she had experienced with her own daughter.

?In a strange confluence, my own journalism career was launched by the tragedy that completely transformed ?Feinstein’s political future. In 1978,? I was a volunteer reporter at KPFA, the progressive public radio station in Berkeley, while I ran wa program for students at risk of dropping out at Berkeley High School just a few blocks a way.

On ?Nov. 27, the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend, I got an urgent call from the newsroom telling me, without any details, that George Moscone and Harvey Milk had been shot. ?I was needed to anchor the newscast, because the regular staff had not returned from the Thanksgiving break. I rushed over to the station, and for the rest of the day was immersed in the ?tragic events of that day, and Feinstein’s singular role in it.

It was shortly thereafter that I became a full-time journalist.? It was only years later that I crossed paths again with Feinstein in Washington D.C.

In today’s fractured environment, with Republicans showing little inclination to actually govern, it's unlikely that Feinstein would have been as effective as she was in her early years in Congress.

Still, it was remarkable to see how a freshman senator, from a progressive city like San Francisco, was somehow able to make progress on crucial issues, and actually get things done.

It is a quality that is still urgently needed – arguably even more so in light of the events over the past week which have wrought even more turmoil to Capitol Hill.

It will be interesting to see whether newly-installed Sen. Lashona Butler will accomplish anything close to what her predecessor was able to.? Feinstein also arrived without any seniority – and also at a time when Washington was undergoing extreme turbulence. Newt Gingrich was on the verge of become the first Republican speaker in over four decades, and was already sowing the seeds for the dysfunction on Capitol Hill today.

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