SAN FRANCISCO — She’s a legend of politics in the Golden State, and the most powerful Democrat in deep-blue California, so Sen. Dianne Feinstein might have expected a friendlier reception in her hometown.
But boos and jeers interrupted Feinstein repeatedly at a town hall meeting Monday, as critics accused California’s senior Senator of not doing enough to stand up to President Donald Trump.
At a rare public forum in California, in front of a mostly full auditorium at the San Francisco Scottish Rite Masonic Center, it sounded at times like Feinstein and the most vocal of her angry constituents were speaking different political languages.
While critics and supporters alike were urging her to speak out more forcefully against Trump, even goading her to call the president “a fascist,” Feinstein resisted, and explained how her power was limited as a single senator in the minority party.
“Everybody thinks that every one person in the House or Senate can change the direction,” she said. “Ladies and gentlemen, we can’t.”
With Feinstein still uncommitted about running for a full fifth term next year, Monday’s raucous greeting could be an indication of the political climate that candidates might face on the campaign trail — even for the safest incumbents.
“She might have misjudged the reaction in the town hall,” University of Southern California professor and political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe said. “She might have assumed that as a Democrat in a Democratic state, she’d get a relatively friendly reception.”
But Bebitch Jeffe said it was too early to say whether the contentious response amounted to typical outbursts from California’s liberals or something bigger.
In an interview with reporters after the town hall, Feinstein brushed aside the tension, calling it an “outrage of feelings” but saying the event went “as expected.”
Overall, most of the about 750 attendees seemed supportive of Feinstein, greeting her with loud applause. She won cheers when she pledged to support legislation to rein in corporate money from elections and investigate the Trump administration’s conflicts of interest.
Specifically, she said her staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee is “looking very closely at the emoluments clause,” the constitutional clause involving foreign support that some believe makes Trump ineligible for president. She also said she was investigating business trips conducted by Trump’s sons.
But she heard loud boos when she said she was “not there” on supporting complete single payer healthcare and didn’t oppose Trump’s missile strikes on Syria. During the very first question, one man stood up and shouted at Feinstein while the crowd yelled back and forth. Later on, a barking dog joined in the cacophony.
Minor chaos at Dianne Feinstein's SF town hall as protester yells and crowd yells back. This was during the very first question pic.twitter.com/hISFunhZfH
— Casey Tolan (@caseytolan) April 17, 2017
Some of the loudest objections to Feinstein’s answers came in her discussions about foreign policy. Feinstein called North Korea the “number one problem” in the world, and an “acute danger for us,” with the Syrian war being the number two problem. “This is something I have never seen in my lifetime,” she said of the humanitarian crisis in Syria, advocating a bigger role for the U.S. in stopping Assad.
When she was interrupted by yelling anti-war protesters, she said. “OK, if you believe you know more than I do about it, you go right ahead. If you want me to speak, you’re going to have to let me speak.”
Later, she told protesters, “you’re pretty good at yelling… You can sit here and pound your fists and I can show you what I’ve gotten done.”
And when hecklers called her a “hawk,” she responded, “why don’t you leave the name-calling out of it.”
Several attendees urged her to be more forceful in condemning Trump. One questioner, the son of a Holocaust survivor, declared that “politics as usual is dead,” and said Trump’s presidency “is not normal, we cannot normalize it.” He asked Feinstein what it would take for her to publicly say that she “cannot work with these fascists in the White House,” and the audience broke into cheers. Feinstein didn’t really answer the question: “You’ve given me an idea, so let me explore that idea,” she said, and then asked for his phone number and name before promptly moving on with an “OK, next.”
Some speakers complained that Feinstein didn’t hold enough town halls, and chose to hold this one on a workday morning far from a BART stop. In response, she pledged to hold another town hall on a weekend in the summer. She also has another town hall scheduled this week in Los Angeles. Although she holds weekly meetings with California visitors to Washington, D.C., she hasn’t held regular large-group town halls like this in California.
Feinstein, whose term is up next year, refused to say whether she was running for re-election. “You’ll find out,” she told reporters after the forum. No Democrat has announced a challenge to her, although UC Berkeley molecular biologist Michael Eisen is running. Feinstein has been raising money for her campaign committee.
A poll conducted by the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies last month found that when voters were reminded that Feinstein will turn 85 next year, a majority say her running for re-election would be a “bad thing for California.”
But with a year and a half to go until the 2018 election, “I don’t think there’s a Bernie Sanders waiting in the wings in California,” ready to challenge Feinstein, Bebitch Jeffe said. And it’s exceedingly rare for California’s incumbent U.S. Senators to face strong primary challengers.
Cynthia Papermaster, a Berkeley activist, had one idea for a challenger. She walked in front of the stage while Feinstein was speaking with a handwritten sign reading “Barbara Lee for Senate 2018,” supporting the anti-war East Bay Congresswoman who hasn’t said anything about running for Senate. Lee “doesn’t blindly follow what the military wants to do,” Papermaster, 70, said in an interview. “We need new leadership.”
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