San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Politics: Is it time for Sen. Dianne Feinstein to exit the stage?
At 87, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is leaving her top Judiciary post, is it a step toward retirement?
They made fun of Robert Byrd, the West Virginia senator so sunken into the depredations of old age that he seemed to be falling asleep even when he wasn’t. Then came President George W. Bush’s rush to war in Iraq, and Byrd led the opposition, at age 85, 44 years into his recordsetting 51year tenure in the Senate.
Byrd’s “Sleepwalking through history” speech in February 2003 very nearly turned the tide against the war, as the late Sen. Ted Kennedy later explained to me.
Byrd understood, as he discussed with me often the last two years of his life, that the onus was on him to show that at his advanced age he was still a vital and effective member of the Senate. He needed to be sure his contributions were so indisputably important that they offset the obvious imperative to step aside and make way for a fresh generation of younger leaders to come into their own.
I hope my senator, Dianne Feinstein, will be as blunt and searching in talking about her future with her inner circle in the weeks ahead. Her decision to step down from being the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the coming session after she was reportedly pressured by New York Senator Chuck Schumer raises more questions than it answers.
She’s already 87 and I’d be stunned if she has in mind serving out her full term, which would put her in office through January 2025. Political transitions are often not so different from the life transition we call death, a truth I’ve pondered on recent socially distanced visits to see my aged parents in San Jose. My dad is 94 and my mother’s 90th birthday is coming up in February.
As it happens, mom has known Feinstein since the 1960s, when my mother was on the state Democratic Central Committee, appointed by family friend Al Alquist, and attended organizing meetings at Feinstein’s house in San Francisco.
I asked my mother if she had an opinion on what Feinstein should do. She gave me a look. My mother always has opinions.
“She should step down,” she told me firmly. “She’s too old. She’s only two years younger than me.”
OK, it’s not quite LBJ losing Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam War, but if Feinstein has lost longtime supporters like my mother, a very sharp cookie on all things political, and she also has to face the reality of enflamed activistprogressive opposition, clearly the question is when, not if, she ends her term early.
So I ask: Why not step down sooner rather than later? At a time and on a pace of her own choosing?
Feinstein’s decision may hinge on the extent to which she accepts the reality that the inauguration of Joe Biden next month will not end the urgent sense of a national emergency, but in some ways will usher us into an even greater political crisis.
We’re still reeling as a country — and will be for months or years to come. We’re simultaneously in denial about how deep the problems go, and how urgent the need to upend and rebuild, and weary of the endless chatter of doom and gloom. As comedian JL Cauvin puts it in a forthcoming collection of essays I edited as publisher of Wellstone Books, “Now What?” “The orange tumor has been removed from the system.” That’s the good news. But: “You’re not out of the woods yet. You’ve got to go to political chemo now.”
Many of us have been twisted up inside with dread, including both the vocal progressive critics of Feinstein and, I’m sure, Feinstein herself. I get that our senior senator would love to focus on using her considerable intellect to help guide the Senate forward. I’m sure she has her own questions about how much the value of her experience and judgment offsets any decline in effectiveness — and relevance.
Roger Angell, the now 100yearold eminence grise of American letters, used to talk to me in the summer of 2002 when we were working together on a book project about the hardest part of aging being that you didn’t know what was a bad day and what was decline.
Let’s say Feinstein had a bad day when she hugged Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., and burbled approvingly about the farcical process of speedconfirming the religious extremist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Fine. Bad days are allowed. A better question is: What can Feinstein do over the next year to breathe life into moldering institutions, laid low by people of bad faith, and to inject urgency and fresh conviction into the daunting project of rebuilding this country?
I have incredible respect for all Feinstein has accomplished over the years. When she was starting out in the ’60s, when my mother knew her, the San Francisco Examiner did a piece about her, noting that she was the youngest person serving on the California Women’s Board of Terms and Paroles, and adding: “It is also a safe guess that she may be the nation’s prettiest parole board member.” The Examiner piece on Feinstein’s “Day of Victory” in November 1969, when she was first elected to the Board of Supervisors, noted: “At 6:45 a.m. she skipped lightly down the red carpeted stairs of the house and offered her guests coffee. Her dress was light blue, with a shortsleeved top and bluebrown plaid Aline skirt.”
Feinstein has had enough of others defining her. Trailblazers of her stature have earned the right to chart their own course. I join my mother in thinking that Feinstein has arrived at the ObiWan Kenobi stage of life, where she can best serve the cause she’s fought for so hard for so long by, in a sense, vanishing into the wind.
“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” said ObiWan.
Feinstein, as bridge to the next generation of leaders who can reinvent the Senate and juice up political communication, can be far more powerful than she could possibly imagine.
Steve Kettmann, a former Chronicle reporter, coauthored “Letter to a New President” with Robert Byrd and, most recently, edited “Now What?: The Voters Have Spoken – Essays on Life After Trump.” He’s codirector of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods writers retreat center near Santa Cruz.