The Poodle Thanks Dianne Feinstein: One Small Act of Kindness, Many Staggeringly Great Acts of Congress

THANKS, DIANNE: I never met Senator Dianne Feinstein, but she and her office provided critical assistance to my sister-in-law Nancy Horn about five years ago, then caught in one of those self-inflicted crises to which we all fall prey. Nancy was scheduled to fly to Poland — her family’s home country — with her sister. But the night before departure, Nancy took a pair of scissors and rounded off the edges of her passport. It would fit better in her fanny pack. It’s possible alcohol was involved. But when I took Nancy to the airport, security wouldn’t let her pass. They took desecration of federal documents seriously. If she wanted to fly, she’d need a new passport. 

And immediately. If Nancy didn’t get on a flight to Poland, her sister would never talk to her again. Diplomatic relations would be abrogated through the end of infinity. 

A key detail: Nancy lived in a small town on the Western Slope in Colorado up above the tree line. There were no passport offices within shooting distance. None in her area code.  

I called the offices of Nancy’s Congressmember. His people had no ideas and were less than interested in figuring out what any might be. In desperation, I called Feinstein’s office in D.C. Our best and only hope, Feinstein’s people told us, was an office in Denver, a five-hour drive away; it closed in six hours. They called the office and notified them Nancy was coming. 

The punchline? Nancy and her sister made it to Poland; a great time was had by all; diplomatic relations were not severed.  

The other punchline? Constituent services matter. It’s the first, second, and third thing elected officials are supposed to do. And Nancy wasn’t remotely Feinstein’s constituent. 

I mention this because Feinstein died just last week after a staggeringly accomplished career, with 30 years in the Senate and 60 years in politics. 

Mysteriously missing in all the hosannas has been a single mention that Feinstein came within a micron of getting her clock cleaned in 1994 by Santa Barbara’s then pseudo-congressmember, a Republican oilionaire and carpet-bagger extraordinaire named Michael Huffington. In an odd way, however, this omission makes complete sense. Michael Huffington was never really there. He was never more than a figment of his money’s imagination.

But he had a whole lot of money. 

Before we talk about the $34 million Huffington spent trying to plug his insatiable existential crisis — he spent $28 million against Feinstein in 1994 and $6 million to buy Santa Barbara’s congressional seat in 1992 — let’s go back to the matter of constituent services. 

Huffington didn’t believe in them. He conflated them with corruption. A moral germaphobe and inveterate handwasher, Huffington — during his two years representing Santa Barbara — refused to meet with constituents, refused to talk to reporters, and refused to tell his own staff where he was. He instructed his chief of staff to shred his voting record. It was all more than a little bit peculiar. Years later, when Huffington announced he had been bisexual all these years, this inexplicable insistence on privacy finally made sense. 

Rather than get out of politics — not a great place for a ferociously closeted person to hide — Huffington chose to double down. Quickly concluding the House of Representatives was beneath him, Huffington decided to run for Senate in 1994 and targeted Feinstein with an unending torrent of television hit pieces. They started in February about six months before most voters are typically paying attention.  

As a human being, Huffington wasn’t a bad guy. As a politician, however, he gave cynicism, opportunism, and the empty pursuit of power a bad name. On the hot-button issue of crime, Huffington didn’t merely champion the Three Strike ballot initiative — a lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key law that sparked a population explosion in state prisons and the mass incarceration of people of color — he became the co-chair of the Three Strikes campaign committee, to which he donated $300,000. Three Strikes has since been modified several times, but it’s inflicted lasting damage, and California has been paying the price ever since. Feinstein — never a softy on law-and-order issues and a supporter of the death penalty — opposed Three Strikes.

On immigration — “They’re here!” then-Governor Pete Wilson would hysterically warn — Huffington eagerly pimped the hate. He infamously endorsed a widely popular measure — Prop. 187 — that would deny publicly funded services to immigrants in the county illegally. That meant no schools, no access to public health — the whole ball of wax of “No.” That endorsement came on October 21, only two weeks away from the election, when he was polling just three percentage points behind Feinstein. 

Nevertheless, the next day, Feinstein came out against the measure. She was scared to death, and for good reason. Prop. 187 would win overwhelmingly with 71 percent of the votes. 

The L.A. Times and the Independent then reported what everyone in Santa Barbara already knew — that the nanny employed by the Huffingtons for the last four years washerself an “illegal” immigrant.

But Huffington had also co-sponsored a House bill making it a federal crime to transport illegal immigrants across state lines for purposes of employment. It turns out his own nanny had been transported across state lines on many occasions. Maybe Huffington was smart to order his voting record shredded.

I learned of the nanny while covering a fundraiser for advocates helping foster kids held at the Huffington’s Montecito mansion. A few days later, I knocked on the door of the nanny’s home. She wasn’t there, so I spoke with her husband instead. He spoke little English; I spoke little Spanish. But we understood one another.  

When the stories broke about Huffington’s hypocrisy, the shit hit the fan. Huffington’s numbers dropped. His campaign sought to deflect attention by accusing me of trying to bribe the nanny. But for Huffington, it did little to limit the damage. Huffington would hold a subsequent press conference gallantly accepting responsibility for the nanny, but steadfastly blaming his glitz-and-glam wife, Arianna, for the mess.  

The 1990s, it turns out, were a more innocent time. Hypocrisy still had the capacity to offend. 

Huffington would lose that race, though by just a few points. It was so nail-bitingly close, Feinstein waited a couple of weeks before claiming victory. Huffington never conceded defeat; instead our “alleged congressman” — as the Independent called him — blamed alleged illegal votes cast by alleged illegal immigrants out to defeat Prop. 187 for Feinstein’s apparent margin of victory. He vowed to conduct a door-to-door investigation to prove these alleged allegations. Like more recent such claims, no evidence nor proof was ever offered. Huffington, to his credit, disappeared gracefully into the ether of history. 

As for Feinstein, she got an assault weapons ban passed — the only senator to ever succeed at this — albeit a temporary one. She secured protections for nearly 10 million acres of California’s desert wilderness, again the only senator to succeed at this. 

Yes, she voted to give George W. Bush a blank check to wage war in Iraq despite this being — both then and in hindsight — obviously the wrong decision. But she atoned by making public — despite strenuous opposition by President Obama and the entire intelligence community — the report exposing the CIA’s long, inglorious, and ineffective history at using torture to extract information in the war against terror. 

And then, most importantly, she got my sister-in-law Nancy on the plane to Poland.

POSTSCRIPT: To clarify any possible misperceptions, I did not break the story about the Huffington’s nanny. I did not mean to suggest, imply, or otherwise insinuate I did. That distinction goes to Dave Lesher, the great reporter with the L.A. Times at the time. I was pretty close on Lesher’s heels, but he got there first. I probably need to add that no, I did not try to bribe the nanny or to bribe her husband either. The column leaves that question hanging. For the record, I most definitely thought about it, but decided against it for a host of reasons, not the least of which being I didn’t have anything to bribe them with.