DiFi is finally done

So Senator Diane Feinstein is finally ready to go. The pundits are chiming in -- Scott Gerber, her former communications director; former L.A. Times editor Nicholas Goldberg; current L.A. Times political columnists Mark Z. Barabak and many others.

DiFi has been a fixture of my political world for nearly 50 years. Mostly I haven't been happy about that. 

In the mid-1970s she lost a second campaign for mayor because there was no room between loosely left and far right in San Francisco's political spectrum of the day. One could hope that would be the end of this prissy matron. 

The assassination of the city's progressive Democratic mayor George Moscone and gay pioneering elected supervisor Harvey Milk thrust her into the job she'd wanted. She held on through ten tumultuous years. 

When she left the mayor's office, it once again looked as if California politics would be done with Feinstein. She lost a campaign for governor in 1990. It wasn't until four years out of office that she was elected to the U.S. Senate seat she's held since 1992.

To many San Franciscans, she always looked like a centrist clogging up the way forward for more modern, more liberal California Democrats. Though she managed to restrict assault weapons for a time, to lead passage of the Violence against Women Act, and supported gay rights, she wasn't the sort we warmed to in office. For years I would explain proudly that, despite living in parallel to DiFi's political history, I'd never voted for her.

In recent years I've mellowed in my feelings about my Senator -- maybe grown more tolerant.

There's Feinstein at Obama's swearing-in, wearing purple, at the far right next to Nancy Pelosi.

I first softened toward Feinstein watching her perform her role in Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration. She served as the official event organizer for the Senate. She came across as careful, very competent, and deeply anxious. I may have been reading into what I saw on TV, but I am pretty sure she feared, as many of us viewers did, that someone might try to kill Obama rather than see him take office. Would they shoot him? This was not abstract for her; after all, she had literally discovered the murdered bodies of colleagues in San Francisco City Hall. She was a right choice to be the formal organizer of that precedent breaking inauguration.

Feinstein finally won a degree of respect from me in the past decade when she led the Senate Intelligence Committee's fight to uncover the tortures used by U.S. spooks in the service of George W. Bush's panicked "War on Terror." U.S. security professionals stonewalled against admitting what they'd done by every legal and some illegal means. Republicans too wanted maximum concealment. Feinstein managed to get 600 pages of summary into the public record. When/if the full thousands of pages of documentation are finally made public, we will know yet more of the crimes done in our name.

”There may never be a right time to release the report,” Feinstein said, but she added that the report is “too important to shelve indefinitely.”

She has always annoyed because she came across as above the fray, a genteel throwback to a different era. Yet this woman has actually seen a great deal of the material violence in politics, very possibly more than some of her bombastic colleagues. 

I'm glad she's leaving, apparently in acceptance of the inevitable. The finale could be worse.