Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco town hall: politics as usual
Last month, activists held a funeral in front of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office for “politics as usual.” After attending her town hall this week, it’s clear to me that the message didn’t take.
To set the scene, the event was held at 11am on a Monday at a fairly inconvenient location. Tickets sold out fast, but the room wasn’t full, even after they let the overflow room into the main hall. When she said “one last question,” the local politician and Democratic Party staple who moderated the event (Bevan Dufty, for those who know the local scene) made her take all four that had been called up. So I’d summarize the overall attitude as begrudging. Overall, this is a crowd that still broadly respects and appreciates Feinstein’s work (she was greeted with good applause as she came out, for instance), but we quickly grew frustrated with her inaction and passivity.
Grabbing the third rail for no particular reason
Things didn’t get off to a great start with her introductory remarks. I think a lot of people were looking for some degree of a “what’s happening is not ok, and I’m going to fight” message. Even at Nancy Pelosi’s town hall a couple weeks ago, despite her incredibly longwinded speeches, she knew this was the message we wanted to hear and threw some red meat to the base. Instead, we got a bit of a complaint about how it’s unfortunate that the nature of the Senate has changed and things were better before. Sure. That is, in fact, unfortunate, but where’s the “so what?”
Then she held up a couple of pie charts and explained that mandatory spending is now most of the budget, crowding out discretionary spending, and this is a big problem now. To which I say three things. First, it’s a political event at 11am on a Monday; most of us who made it are broadly familiar with the basic contours of the federal budget. Second, congratulations on identifying the main observation that pretty much everyone who has looked at the federal budget in the last decade has mentioned. And third, why the heck did you just grab the third rail of entitlement spending without even being asked? And if she’s going to make the unforced error of bringing up entitlement reform for absolutely no reason whatsoever, at least she has something substantial to say about it, right? Some kind of plan or proposal? Nope. I guess she just thought she’d remind us, without saying so, that she’s reportedly open to raising the retirement age. Thanks.
“Everything you’ve been talking about is politics as usual”
I’d like to go into some detail on two related exchanges that took place, because I think it really sums up the entire theme: Sen. Feinstein operating in a very “politics as usual” mode and an audience that believes the situation is profoundly not normal and calls for, well, something more.
One man, an Indivisible SF member known as Master Steve, stood up and said “everything you’ve been talking about is politics as usual.” He gave an impassioned description of his mother’s time in several “holocaust centers” and related this to Spicer’s comments, Bannon, Miller, and Gorka (“an actual Nazi…in the White House in the United States”). He declared: “We knew a long time ago that politics as usual was over; we had a funeral outside your office for the death of politics as usual.” The Senator then tried to ask, and I’ll give her credit for engaging here, “what would you substitute it with?” He explained that she previously talked about the “red line” on Syria and now he wants to know if there’s a red line for Democrats in Congress where they will refuse to work with fascists, because this is not normal.
Her response:
“You’ve given me an idea, so I’m going to explore that idea.”
She asks for him to give his contact information.
Then she just says, “ok. Next.”
Um. What now? It seemed as if this was the first time someone suggested she fight Nazis and she’s going to have a good think on it now. After a lot of shouting of “answer the question,” she pretty much acknowledged that it’s going to be politics as usual: “you need the votes, so you can sit here and pound your fists and I can show you what I’ve done, and you can take a look at it, and I’d be surprised if you found too many Senators if any that have gotten more done…But I don’t get there by making statements I can’t deliver. I get there through some caution, some discussion, some smart help…and we generally get where we’re going.”
When a guy is talking about how many concentration camps his mother was shuffled between and is asking quite literally whether she’ll fight Nazis now, “some caution” is presumably not what he, or anyone else, was looking for.
Do you like tweeting?
A bit later, another questioner (I’ve seen him identified as Aram F.) was kind enough to follow-up on that. He reminded her that she can do things besides try to cautiously get the votes to pass a bill: she has the power of her voice. He told her that when someone gets up and asks her if she’s going to fight fascists, we want to hear from her “loudly and strongly.”
And in a really revealing moment, she responds: “wait, wait wait wait, does anybody believe that I am the least bit for fascism or anti-Semitism? My whole record indicates exactly not.” Then she said the Judiciary Committee will have a hearing after the recess on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The questioner spoke for me, and I think most of the room, saying that he, of course, doesn’t think she personally supports these things, but that we aren’t hearing her voice in pubic against them, because the situation is not normal, and it calls for her to speak up.
Her response was unexpected:
“Well, let me ask you, do you like tweeting?”
A bit of a back-and-forth ensued between the crowd, which had some Twitter fans in the audience, the questioner, who originally said yes, but acknowledged that was “because everybody else said yes, but I actually don’t like tweeting because I don’t think it’s as powerful”, and Sen. Feinstein, who agreed that she doesn’t find it a powerful medium.
Now, I think it’s swell not to like Twitter — Twitter is indeed obnoxious—, and I’m not expecting Dianne Feinstein to suddenly become the next @darth, but the problem is that we’re not hearing her voice loudly through any medium. Remember that the question wasn’t whether she’ll tweet more; it was whether she’ll speak out loudly against wrongdoing and injustice.
Her centrism, which is so often a liability, could be a real strength here: she has the credibility to reach out to a lot of moderates and make a persuasive case that “this is not normal.” Dismissing social media entirely, instead of realizing it as a tool with strengths and weaknesses, is really not endearing in 2017. More significantly, it shows she’s still stuck in the mode of the Senate as some kind of congenial compromising body where tough bills are worked out through long nights of hard work on both sides of the aisle, and that thinking is downright dangerous in an age where Sen. McConnell has demonstrated that he will flip the table at any opportunity.
When our questioner suggested that, instead of tweeting, she also has the ability to go on the news and draw attention to these issues by speaking up, she explained that the TV networks have to call you. Which, of course, ignores the fact that clearly nobody is calling her cause she’s not saying anything. Somehow, California reps like Rep. Maxine Waters and Rep. Ted Lieu have developed national reputations by saying far more than Sen. Feinstein, and they don’t seem to have a problem making their voices heard. The problem here is that she’s not speaking up, not the size of the megaphone.
Running from single-payer and a late-breaking discovery about the sabotage of Obamacare
Another troubling point came when she discussed health care. She ran far away from single-payer when asked, immediately declaring she doesn’t want a government takeover of healthcare, and then said “if single-payer means trying to work out some of the problems that are existing, we’ve got immediate problems coming up.” That is, in fact, not what single-payer means, and it’s insulting that she would think we would buy that.
She quickly pivoted to talk about Republican efforts to halt the cost sharing subsidies, saying that she just learned about this and read some memo last night about the House lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed in late 2014. It’s been a pretty significant story. While I don’t expect her to know every policy nuance on every topic, breathlessly announcing that she just read a thing last night about how Republicans are trying to sabotage the ACA really gave the impression that she was uninformed.
One of a hundred
Foreign policy was as contentious as you’d expect a discussion on foreign policy between a San Francisco audience and Dianne Feinstein to be (broad theme: we’re not real fans of war). With regard to Syria, she made a show of saying that Trump now needs to put together a military strategy and go to Congress for approval, but I suppose she hasn’t considered what will happen when that obviously doesn’t happen (nothing, of course).
The other theme, which came up a few times, was essentially that she’s one of a hundred and “you’re asking an individual Senator to do something.” Which yes, is what we’re asking for, since she is our Senator. Nobody is asking her to unilaterally fix everything overnight, but she fundamentally didn’t seem to grasp that this is a new game now, and centrist consensus dealmaking is not the mode the Republicans are operating under. Everything had to be couched in cautious terms: we’re looking at Russia in our committee, hopefully we can get more investigators; we’re looking at putting together a lawsuit on Trump’s ethics issues, if we can find out how much it will cost and get the money together; we’re looking at use of government funds for the Trump kids’ travel, we’ll see if there’s anything we can do. Every talking point felt five years out of date; every action too little and too slow. This was pretty well summed up when she said “it’s just still April.” It seemed that the audience was looking for something more and something faster.
2018
When you walked into the town hall, you had to pass a table with her office’s press releases and other handouts; the table was labeled something like “Sen. Feinstein opposes Trump policies.” And as a summary of the whole event, the fact that she needed to explicitly advertise this point is a pretty good indicator of how wrong things have for the Senator. It should be a given. And opposing the most odious Trump policies needs to rate far higher on her priority list than, say, worrying about candy-flavored drugs.
There are increasingly strong reports that Feinstein will run again in 2018. Based on what I saw, I really hope she doesn’t. Leaving age aside entirely, people clearly want somebody who’s going to fight, and she has time-after-time again indicated that’s not what she’s going to do. Sen. Feinstein has been my representative almost my entire life. Every time I get particularly mad at her, I think back on one of the most haunting moments in politics I’ve ever seen, the video of her announcing the City Hall shootings, and I remember what a long legacy of public service she’s held in San Francisco and this state.
But at the end of the day, California needs a Senator who we don’t have to ask if she’ll fight fascists. California needs a Senator who doesn’t respond to that question as if objecting to Sebastian Gorka was a novel concept. To use the theme of the day, California needs a Senator who understands this isn’t “politics as usual.” From what I saw at her town hall, that’s not Sen. Feinstein.
