California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein unofficially launched her third reelection bid at the state Democratic Party Convention in Sacramento on April 30 with a fiery (for her) speech attacking congressional Republicans. Here’s a transcript of an excerpt from the video, starting at about minute 02:20:
What I see in Washington now is really the most difficult environment I’ve ever seen in American politics. It’s made harder still because the far right wing and the tea party have entered into the political arena with a singular mission to cut government so it cannot serve our people. This is the fundamental challenge we face today.
In the five months since Republicans have taken control of the House they’ve tried to systematically disassemble the American dream by targeting environmental protections, investments in eductation and infrastructure and, most recently, health care reform and Medicare.
The majority party in today’s House of Representatives is more radical, more hostile to working people, more determined to undermine a Democratic president than the Gingrich Congress in 1995.
They pay lip service to balancing the budget and to reducing the deficit, even though it was Pres. Bill Clinton who left office with a $120 billion surplus, and, I might say, a projection that over the next 10 years, the surplus would amount to $5.6 trillion. It was also Dick Cheney who famously said “Deficits don’t matter.” It was the previous administration that fought two wars on the debt rather than increase taxes.
In eight years, this has added more than $1 trillion to the deficit, and you should know America has always fought its wars with a war tax. World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea. People pay to help it matter. The Bush administration put it all on the debt — and that’s the debt that Barack Obama and the United States Congress inherited.
In reality, the tea party has no plans for job creation and economic recovery. What they have is a radical, ideological agenda to dismantle the social and economic safety net of our country. Their solution to our fiscal challenges is to shift the burden of debt reduction onto seniors, students, middle and low-income families. And we have to stop them.
Okay, so it’s hardly blistering rhetoric, but coming from Feinstein — who is reviled as a DINO among the Democratic base — this was real red meat stuff, and the fact that she chose to go on the attack against the GOP in her first political speech of the pre-campaign season is interesting.
Is she warning off Republican challengers next year? She ran virtually unopposed last time — or, rather, her opponent, Dick Mountjoy, was virtually unknown outside Sacramento, where he was infamous as the Assembly member who introduced Proposition 187, the 1994 anti-immigrant ballot initiative that put the California Republican Party into the slow but steady death spiral it is experiencing today. Feinstein beat him by about 25 percentage points.
Worse for the GOP, it’s got no bench. The “outsiders” they fielded last year — former EBay exec Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the failed CEO of Hewlett-Packard, were both disasters.
The only Republican woman in the state with any sort of stature is Condoleeza Rice — you know, the war criminal. The guys with the biggest names are in the House, the traditional proving ground for U.S. senators, but they all unelectable in statewide races. Rep. Darrell Issa is a considered a clown and a buffoon. Rep. Dan Lungren, the former attorney general, lost his 1998 race for governor against Gray Davis by 14 points; last year, he was one of a very few House Republicans who was nearly unseated despite the GOP wave nationwide. Rep. Tom McClintock is so far to the right that he is completely out of step with mainstream California voters. He has lost every every race for statewide office, including a run for governor in the 2003 recall of Gov. Davis.
It is also unlikely that the national GOP and its various big-money interest groups — who wasted millions trying to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer last year, and received a double-digit drubbing for their trouble — will be willing to bet against Feinstein’s reelection next year.
In its coverage of the state Democratic Convention, the political site CalBuzz reported that the mood among the attendees was not what might have been expected. It was the state party’s first meeting after it trounced the Republicans last November, winning all statewide offices but one, as well as Boxer’s Senate seat, by at least 10 points.
California’s Democrats turned back the Republican red wave that swept across the country last November, returning Barbara Boxer to the U.S. Senate, winning all of their Congressional and state Senate seats, picking up a spot in the Assembly and capturing all of the statewide constitutional offices, including bringing Jerry Brown back for a third term as governor.
And they’re pissed off.
They’re furious that labor unions are under attack from Madison to Costa Mesa. They’re angry that Republicans in Congress are threatening Medicare and a woman’s right to choose. They’re enraged about tax breaks for the wealthy, subsidies for oil companies, assaults on the environment, injustice for immigrants. And they’re especially irate that the minority party in Sacramento has forced their majority-party legislators to approve $12.5 billion in cuts with no concessions that would allow passage of a state budget.
California is famous for setting trends that play out nationwide. (The state owes the country big time for the Reagan revolution, for example.) So let’s hope that Feinstein’s speech and the mood at the convention are harbingers that Democrats across the country are finally getting angry and that they will stand up to the bullies on the right.
That’s DiFi. Govern like a DINO, campaign like a progressive firebrand. Yawn.