Rivals must tread lightly on veteran politicians’ ages

Of the many huge challenges Kevin de León faces in trying to unseat Dianne Feinstein, the toughest is this: How does the state Senate president say it’s time for the 84-year-old U.S. senator to go without saying she’s old?

Oh, there are plenty ways to say “old” without saying “old” in that passive-aggressive language known as political-speak. “Time for a new generation.” “The status quo will not stand.” And, my personal favorite, “It’s time for new ideas.” As if there ever are any. The good news for de León is that here in California, there’s no shortage of Democrats who toppled their, ahem, veteran fellow party members. We’ve seen how this can work.

The bad news for de León is that none of those examples provides a perfect path to follow. What he needs to win — aside from name recognition and money to defeat the multimillionaire first elected in 1992 — is either a scandal or a sign of age-related incompetence.

So far, neither has surfaced.

Polls say most voters approve of the way Feinstein is doing her job. Her age isn’t a problem — until you mention it. An April Berkeley IGS survey found that 48 percent of the respondents thought it was a good idea for her to seek re-election. But after they were told that Feinstein is 84, that support dropped to 38

percent.

In 2012, 31-year-old Dublin City Councilman Eric Swalwell defeated 80-year-old Rep. Pete Stark. Stark made it easy for him with a series of doddering moves.

Like the time that Stark visited The Chronicle editorial board, looked around the room and accused one of us of giving money to Swalwell, which would be a breach of journalistic ethics.

We all looked around at each other, baffled — and curious to see what proof Stark had. Then, he pointed to my friend and former colleague, Debra J. Saunders.

You might remember the name of Deb’s blog: “The Token Conservative.”

“I’m a Republican,” incredulous Saunders told Stark, as I tried to keep from falling off my chair laughing. Stark later apologized, saying he was confused.

Keep in mind that at the time the Democratic establishment — including President Barack Obama, Feinstein, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and then-state Attorney General Kamala Harris — all endorsed Stark, who refused to debate Swalwell in the general election.

“I don’t think he’s fit to be in office,” Swalwell said at the time, saying that he was coming undone “before my eyes.”

But saying that wasn’t the same thing as dropping an O-bomb on him.

“We never used the age of Stark to run against him,” Swalwell told me this week. “It was about performance, being engaged and showing up. That’s not a case you can prosecute against Sen. Feinstein.” Swalwell is backing Feinstein.

Last year, we saw 40year-old Ro Khanna, who had never held public office, take on eight-term incumbent Rep. Mike Honda, 75, for the second time. This time Khanna won, even though Honda had the support of a Democratic political establishment that protects its own. Both times, Pelosi endorsed Honda over Khanna.

What helped Khanna? A House Ethics Committee investigation into whether Honda’s staff used government resources to help his re-election shadowed the campaign.

But Khanna, who supports de León, told me that taking on Feinstein is different.

“The case needs to be on the big moral and political questions of the 21st century,” Khanna said.

Feinstein was “for the war in Iraq,” “has supported the expansion of the Patriot Act and mass surveillance on U.S. citizens,” and “voted for the Bush tax cuts to the 1 percent,” Khanna said.

“Feinstein has been wrong,” he said. “It has nothing to do with age or gender. This is about Feinstein’s record and her poor judgment on some of the biggest questions of war and peace and economics in the 21st century.”

And then there’s what happened back in 1989, when a Bay Area member of Congress in her first full term said that then 75-year-old Sen. Alan Cranston, a fellow Democrat, “should think very seriously” about whether he really wanted to run for another term in 1992. Cranston had already started raising money for what would have been a fifth term.

That first-term Democrat was Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

But in 1989, Cranston was caught up in the savings-and-loan scandal. He and four other senators in 1987 intervened with federal banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, who donated nearly $1 million to various Cranston political causes. Ultimately, a Senate Ethics Committee investigation formally reprimanded Cranston. In 1990, he announced that he would not seek re-election as he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Long before that, Pelosi was among the first California Democrats to tell Cranston that it was time to go. She framed it politically, not chronologically.

Cranston “is an honest man” Pelosi said at the time. But politically, she said, she would “hate to see him in a campaign framed” by the scandal. “I think it would have been difficult (for Cranston to win another term) even absent this incident,” she said.

Next Wednesday, Ryan Khojasteh will announce his candidacy to run against Pelosi. The member of San Francisco’s Immigrant Rights Commission will turn 25 — the minimum age to serve in the House — five days before election day 2018. If elected, he would undoubtedly not only be one of the youngest, but one of the poorest members of Congress. He lives in student housing in the Tenderloin, where he is in law school at UC Hastings. He has $150,000 of student debt.

He told me that de León inspired his run.

“We don’t want the same old, same old, tired old Washington politicians in there,” he said.

Whoa, that sounds a little ageist. No, he corrected.

“It has to do with your length of your tenure in Washington,” Khojasteh said. “The role of a public servant is to build a foundation and pass it on the the next generation. Not stay there forever.”