I know: De mortuis nil nisi bonum. I have been a journalist for more than 40 years. When a prominent figure like Dianne Feinstein dies, nobody wants to say anything that isn’t positive.
And I was going to just stay out of this one.
She was, by any account, a formidable politician who had a major impact. Let her rest in peace.
But the hagiography, sometimes simply inaccurate, has reached a level where I have to correct the record.
I covered Feinstein when she was mayor, as well as her unsuccessful run for governor and her career in the Senate.
I wrote dozens of stories about her disastrous urban planning policies. At one point, her media office refused to send me routine press releases so I wouldn’t know when she would be attending public events. When I complained (that’s not actually legal) the office started sending the releases with no zip code on them, so they would arrive after the events were over.
Through our many decades, I always liked Dianne, and am sorry to see her go. Yes, she could be charming. She was a native San Franciscan, and the first woman to become its mayor. She was also, technically, the first woman to represent California in the US Senate, although Barbara Boxer won her seat in the same election.
Boxer ran and won on a very progressive platform, including a call for big cuts in wasteful military spending and more scrutiny of Supreme Court nominees, after the disaster that was the Clarence Thomas hearing. Feinstein’s slogan was “the only Democrat who supports the death penalty.”
Because of a bit of arcane Senate protocol, Feinstein was sworn in a few minutes before Boxer, making her the senior senator and the first woman Senator from California.
Others have written about how she was going to get out of politics until the Moscone-Milk assassinations thrust her into the role of mayor, a job she’d sought and lost twice before.
I want to talk about what she did when she got that office.
Feinstein was an honest, direct, a strong leader. There’s a lot to be said for that.
She was a role model for a generation of women in local and national politics.
But the media narrative that Feinstein “pulled the city together” after the horrifying assassinations is wrong. Actually, what she did was immediately move to dismantle everything that George Moscone and Harvey Milk had worked for.
She quickly fired Moscone’s two progressive planning commissioners, Charlie Starbuck and Ina Dearman, signaling that the city was open to anything developers wanted. She then moved to help the campaign to get rid of district elections. It wasn’t about “pulling the city together.” It was about defeating the left.
Feinstein vetoed the nation’s first bill, by the late Sup. Harry Britt, that would have given domestic partners who worked for the city the right to healthcare benefits that they were denied, because gay people couldn’t marry.
Then she vetoed a measure by Sup. Nancy Walker declaring “Reproductive Rights Day” in San Francisco, saying it was “too divisive.”
That happened right after a weird fringe group of the radically pro-gun leftist White Panther Party got mad at Feinstein signing a gun-control bill (one issue she was always good on) and circulated recall petitions.
Feinstein, with the help of husband Dick Blum, raised a huge sum of money from the local business and development community and easily crushed the recall.
She was terrible on tenant issues. She vetoed a 1984 Britt bill that would have extended rent control to vacant apartments. That would have saved the homes of thousands of renters and kept housing prices much lower for years—and might have forced then-Assembly Speaker Willie Brown to block the Costa-Hawkins Act, which outlawed effective rent control. It would have been hard for him to screw his own city and his own constituents.
Britt’s legislation was transformative, a once-in-a-career bill that would have changed forever the lives of tens of thousands of tenants, given the city a weapon against evictions and displacement, and made housing more affordable for generations of renters..
Gentrification, the process of allowing developers to build without limit and without paying any fees that would alleviate the impacts of their office towers on housing, displacement, schools, Muni or anything else in the city, was rampant on her watch.
Thousands of low-income people were forced out of the city because of her policies.
In fact, her administration sowed the seeds for what we are now reaping: A monocrop office economy facing a crisis because all of the more diverse businesses, including blue-collar jobs, were crushed in the name of finance, insurance, real-estate, and later tech.
She never once appeared at a Pride Parade, because she was afraid photos of her at that event might hurt her future career.
She opposed same-sex marriage and told Newsom that it was “too much, too fast” when he ordered the city clerk to allow those nuptials. (Although activist Jim Haas once said that Feinstein didn’t care who you slept with, as long as you were in bed by 11 o’clock.)
In the Senate, she supported the Bush invasion of Iraq, and the detentions at Guantanamo Bay. She later was nasty to a group of kids who wanted her to support the Green New Deal. She talked about how wonderful the Republicans were at the hearing that confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court (a move that would guarantee the end of Roe v Wade.)
She thought of herself as a centrist, and seemed to believe that these were still the old days when Republicans and Democrats could work together. But those days are long over, and she kept up the pretense when others realized that the Republicans were not interested in governing any more.
She never demonstrated concern about economic inequality or poor people, either as mayor or as senator. Her friends and allies were rich, and she was of and for them.
She will be celebrated for her many accomplishments, and she will deserve that. I’m sorry it had to end this way; she should have retired before this last term, so she could have had, and enjoyed, all the accolades.
But that wasn’t her way. Nobody told Feinstein what to do. She held her own against all comers, all the way to the end. Good for her.
I just want, as Gwen Craig says, the truth to be told about the rest.Tim Redmond is the editor of 48hills.org.
