Tragedy thrust Dianne Feinstein into the national spotlight in 1978, paving the way for a trailblazing career. That spotlight is back and much harsher than it has ever been. Her age and temperament have now became a source of frustration for Democrats.
By the fall of 1978, Feinstein — who had served as a San Francisco city supervisor since 1969 — had lost two mayoral elections, in 1971 and 1975. She had recently returned from a trip to Nepal, where she had gotten sick. She was president of the Board of Supervisors, but the position offered no obvious path to greater influence or power.
Ill-tempered to begin with, White had been especially enraged because Mayor George Moscone would not allow him to retake the Board of Supervisors seat he had resigned from earlier that month. He also held a political grudge against Harvey Milk, the gay rights icon and city supervisor who had become the conservative White’s political nemesis.
A besieged gay community thus found an unlikely but steadfast ally. “Dianne Feinstein doesn’t care who you sleep with, as long as you’re in bed by eleven o’clock,”Feinstein ran for governor in 1990 and lost, but won a U.S. Senate seat in 1992. Californians also elected Barbara Boxer, meaning that the state would be represented in the upper chamber of Congress by two Jewish women from Northern California.
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