Why Progressives Want To Replace DiFi With Kevin de León-- And Why Establishment Conservatives Don't

Past/future of California

Ro Khanna (D-CA) was right this week when he wrote a Sacramento Bee OpEd calling for California voters to jettison Dianne Feinstein in 2018. Sadly, most California Democratic electeds privately agree with his reasoning and conclusion but have neither the integrity nor courage to say so in public. "If the 2016 election taught us anything," he wrote, "it is that voters are looking for new ideas, new leadership and a new beginning to our politics.They are frustrated that the turnover rate in Congress is lower than contemporary European monarchies. They believe public service should be a calling, not an entitlement for life. In an era of unprecedented change, voters want leaders who understand the complex challenges of the 21st century economy. They seek leaders who have a vision for shared prosperity in places left behind and for the jobs of the future." And he asked his readers to evaluate DiFi within this context as she seeks "a fifth term in 2018, one that would extend to 2024." Acknowledging her nearly 5 decades of accomplishments, he asked "Why then should California seek a new voice and jettison years of seniority?"

Put simply, we are not living in ordinary times.

At stake are the fundamental values of what defines us as Californians and Americans. On the big questions of this new century, Feinstein has been wrong.

She was wrong to vote for the Iraq war. She was wrong to be the lead sponsor of the Patriot Act and then to push for its extension. She was wrong to support President George W. Bush’s expansion of the National Security Agency in conducting surveillance on U.S. citizens and collecting metadata.

She was wrong to introduce legislation to outlaw encryption, compromising the personal data and privacy of consumers. And she has consistently been wrong about restricting speech online, including supporting The Stop Online Piracy Act, which faced a backlash from netroots activists and millennials.

Apart from her problematic voting record, she has failed to show leadership on issues of income inequality. She has not offered any pathway to Medicare for All, even being dismissive of the goal itself.

She has failed to lead on issues of debt-free college. She has not introduced bold proposals to increase wages for working families. Although she undoubtedly shares core Democratic values, she is not pushing the envelope to offer an alternative to the current economic system, which so many Americans believe is rigged against them.

California can do better. Our state is home to some of the most innovative policy thinking in the nation and the most passionate grassroots activism. We deserve a senator who will help lead on the big issues in the years ahead.

Harold Meyerson's column at the American Prospect was harsher, suggesting DiFi has outlived her moment. The oldest member of the Senate started on the right of the Democratic Party way back when she was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and has moved further right on key issues while "Democrats have moved left... California has moved left; and California Democrats have moved more to the left than Democrats anyplace else... In her 25 years in the Senate, she has always stood well to the right of the Golden State’s other elected Democrats, not to mention its Democratic voters."

Indeed, Feinstein designed her initial appearance on the stage of statewide politics with the specific intent of showing just how far to the right of Democratic activists she actually stood. During her first bid for statewide office (she previously had served as San Francisco’s mayor), she delivered a speech to the delegates at the 1990 convention of the state’s Democratic Party in which she made damn clear that unlike John Van de Kamp—the state’s liberal attorney general, who was her opponent in that year’s Democratic primary for governor—she emphatically supported the death penalty.

Her ringing endorsement of San Quentin’s gas chamber produced an immediate and noisy chorus of boos from the delegates, as her campaign had anticipated and planned for, since her subsequent television commercials featured the footage of her standing at the podium, defying the fuzzy-headed liberal boo-birds and that wuss Van de Kamp while standing up for crime victims. Feinstein went on to lose November’s gubernatorial run-off to Republican Pete Wilson, but two years later she won election to the Senate.

...Over the years, Feinstein has been a reliable Democratic vote on most occasions, but her persistent right turns on a number of landmark votes have marked her as the most conservative Democratic senator from a solidly blue state.

In 1999, Feinstein voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, which tore down Glass-Steagall’s wall between depositor and investment banking. Most Democrats, to be sure, joined her, but Boxer—along with Russ Feingold, Tom Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, and Paul Wellstone, among others—voted no.

In 2000, Feinstein voted for the bill establishing “permanent normal trade relations”-- free trade-- with China. Almost immediately, American manufacturers began their exodus from the industrial Midwest to the low-wage, union-free Middle Kingdom.

In 2001, Feinstein was one of just 12 Democrats to vote for George W. Bush’s tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, nine of whom came from states Bush had carried the previous November. No senator from a state that had voted as heavily against Bush as California chose to join her in support of the legislation. At the time of the vote, Feinstein was (and still is) among the wealthiest members of the Senate, with an estimated net worth in the hundreds of millions, thanks to the fortune amassed by her husband, Richard Blum.

In 2002, Feinstein voted for the resolution authorizing the United States to go to war in Iraq: 23 of her Democratic Senate colleagues, including Boxer, voted against the resolution, as did 24 of the California Democrats in the House-- a clear majority of the state’s Democratic delegation. Indeed, on a host of issues, not just Boxer but the state’s leading House members, beginning with Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, stood well to Feinstein’s left.

...The most likely figure to emerge as a Democratic challenger to Feinstein is State Senate President Kevin de León. To his fellow progressives, he should also be the most deserving, and to his fellow Californians, quite probably the candidate with the most compelling story. The son of Guatemalan immigrant parents (his father is also half-Chinese), de León was raised by his housekeeper mother, became a teacher, and in 1994 helped organize the massive Latino immigrant demonstration in opposition to the anti-immigrant Proposition 187. One of a number of young activists who worked under the tutelage of Miguel Contreras, the brilliant Los Angeles labor leader, de Leon was elected to the state Assembly from a racially diverse, heavily immigrant downtown Los Angeles district in 2006, and to the state Senate in 2010.

As Senate president, de León authored and steered to passage the landmark legislation that requires California to generate half its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. He also convinced his Senate colleagues to pass somewhat skeletal and provisional single-payer legislation, and conceived and persuaded the legislature to enact a pioneering bill to provide IRAs to the nearly seven million low-wage California workers who aren’t offered retirement benefits on the job, creating a state-managed fund through paycheck deductions from which workers would have to opt out.

...Feinstein supporters’ main argument against the very idea of a Democratic challenge is that it would require a massive diversion of money and energy that should instead be invested in efforts to unseat Republicans. That’s an argument that cannot be easily dismissed: A challenge to Feinstein would indeed require millions of progressive dollars that could otherwise be spent on Democrat-versus-Republican races, just as efforts to beat back that challenge would also require the re-routing of Democratic dollars.

The counter to that criticism is that a de León candidacy holds promise of activating all wings of the new progressive California and bringing voters to the polls who wouldn’t otherwise turn out. Seven of the state’s 14 Republican members of Congress represent districts that Clinton carried last November; Democrats are contesting all of those districts. A high-profile candidacy by de León-- who’s relatively young (50), progressive, Latino, and Asian-- could bring enough Latino and young voters to the polls to help swing a number of those districts. For all their considerable merits, the same can’t be said of Steyer and Sanberg.

California has emerged as the capital of anti-Trump America, and, more than that, as the progressive model for America’s future. That shift is due as much to de Leon as to anyone else-- even including Jerry Brown, the governor whom he prods from the left.

  And San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joe Garofoli offered a roadmap for defeating her.

How do you defeat an incumbent senator with near-universal name recognition, a place in history as California’s first female senator, a net worth of $94 million and the party establishment tripping over themselves to say nice things about her? Just this week, one of her erstwhile challengers, Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti, threw a fundraiser for Feinstein and the United Farm Workers union endorsed her.

...To many progressives, DiFi is, in no particular order, a corporatist, Iraq war-mongering, single-payer-health-care-dubious, not-anti-Trump-enough, pro-Patriot Act, anti-Edward Snowden one-percenter. For starters. And she has got to go.

“This is a movement moment. It’s not enough to resist,” said Bill Honigman, the California state director for the national Progressive Democrats of America. “You need to offer a replacement for things that generally need to be replaced.”

And it ain’t going to be a Republican.

“I don’t think she can be beaten in a Senate race,” said former South Bay GOP Rep. Tom Campbell, whom Feinstein defeated for Senate in 2000. “Certainly a Republican won’t be able to do it.”

Given the anemia of the California GOP, it will be difficult to beat Feinstein by doing anything but running to her political left-- which de León would be best positioned to do. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, said she is “not running for Senate in 2018.” Billionaire San Francisco environmentalist Tom Steyer is still Hamleting on a run and wealthy Los Angeles [Orange County] entrepreneur Joseph Sanberg has little name recognition.

So, according to progressive leaders, here is the road map for how to beat DiFi:

Keep saying she’s soft on Trump: Anti-Trumpism is the breakfast of champions for progressives and many feel Feinstein hasn’t touched her plate. Moulitsas and others found Feinstein’s comment “offensive” last month that Trump “has the ability to learn and to change. And if he does, he can be a good president. And that’s my hope.”

More offensive to others is that Feinstein voted for 11 of President Trump’s 22 Cabinet and other upper-level nominees, while fellow California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris voted to confirm only four.

“It has to be a referendum on Trump because she has been conciliatory,” said Marcy Winograd, a leader of the California Democratic Party’s 1,100-member progressive caucus. “She says you have to have patience. It’s no time for patience.”

Keep asking, “Where’s DiFi?” There are two things Feinstein rarely does: town halls and debates. That could be a liability in the social media Era of Oversharing, especially among voters under 30, as more Millennials (35 percent) disapprove of Feinstein than approve (34 percent), according to a September Berkeley IGS poll.

Unless things change, history may remember Campbell as the last person to debate Feinstein-- and that was almost in the last millennium (2000). Feinstein hasn’t deigned to debate her last two Republican Senate opponents. In 2012, her campaign manager, Bill Carrick, shrugged off a debate challenge from Republican Elizabeth Emken, saying, “This is the sort of typical cliche move from someone (who) is 19 points down and has $25,000 in the bank and 35 percent name recognition,” Carrick said.

“We feel that her job is to represent California and not be a personality where it is about her and not us,” said Aram Fischer, a leader of Indivisible San Francisco, which at 4,500 members is one of the largest local resistance groups in the nation. “We don’t think that Dianne Feinstein is meeting that standard.”

Keep talking about single-payer Medicare-for-all: This weekend, the National Nurses United-- the Oakland-based union with 100,000 members in California-- will hold 100 grassroots actions in all 80 state Assembly districts to talk about an issue on the top of progressive wish lists. Any Feinstein challenger who talks up single payer has a chance to tap into their energy.

“That’s an indication that you have an activist base that’s getting active,” said union spokesman Chuck Idelson.

Keep hoping the revolution will be nationalized: A candidate not named “Tom Steyer” or “Joe Sandberg” can’t keep pace with the bottomless bank of DiFi. But progressives feel money won’t matter as much because the race will draw national attention-- and small dollar donations from progressives around the country. If a Democrat with no political resume, like Jon Ossoff, could raise a record $30 million for a special House race in suburban Atlanta, imagine what someone like de León, with a record of legislative accomplishment, could raise.

“This race will be nationalized-- and I will do everything I can to make it so,” said Moulitsas, whose DailyKos operation has an email list of 3 million and between 10 million and 12 million unique monthly visitors.

Keep focusing on your voters: A progressive candidate-- particularly de León-- could be attractive to a coalition of Latinos, African Americans and Millennials, Moulitsas said. “Of course, those are also the voters who don’t vote (in high numbers) in midterm elections. But long term it is the right bet. That is the future of the party.”

Combine that coalition with white progressives and stir in the energy of new grassroots anti-Trump resistance groups like Indivisible, and a progressive candidate could have enough votes to climb into the top two finishers in a June primary.

Look for at least de León to jump in. Traditionally, it would be career suicide for a fellow Democrat to take on such a well-respected incumbent like Feinstein. But the feeling among de León supporters is that even if he loses, he would be appealing to the progressive future of the party’s voters.

Running would be good for him-- and good for progressives.

“It would be,” Moulitsas said, “a win-win.”