The Villain of the DiFi Saga

Many of you may have noticed a couple days ago that Ken Klippenstein of the Intercept took it upon himself to attempt to destroy the careers of every staffer working for Dianne Feinstein. In the since deleted twitter thread, he laid out the twitter handles, salaries, headshots, and positions of every staffer he could find, and declared that none of those folks should be allowed to work in Democratic politics again because they “enabled” the farce of Senator Feinstein’s continued performance as Senator. As a whole, the thread made me wonder how big of an asshole you have to be to somehow not make it at the Intercept and associated enterprises, given the character of the folks who manage to succeed there. But to take the argument with all the seriousness it deserves:

1. If the real issue with Dianne Feinstein was that her staffers were inappropriately propping her up out of concern over there career prospects, it would be the easiest problem in the world to solve; just promise them lucrative, influential jobs if they convince her to resign! As we’ve noted here many times, corruption in politics is rarely as big of a problem as true belief, because corruption allows for manageable, obvious solutions. As it happens the staffers don’t really make all that much and the job sounds like it sucks, so threatening their prospects is unlikely to force them to change their behavior.
2. If you did manage to force them to resign, the staffers would be replaced before the ink dried on their resignation letters. IT IS NOT DIFFICULT FOR A CALIFORNIA SENATOR TO HIRE STAFFERS, and if she had to dip into a pool of folks who don’t normally work in DC, it would be extraordinarily easy for any remaining senior personnel to put together a staff that either didn’t care overmuch about their longterm DC employment prospects, or were willing to risk the wrath of Ken Klippenstein and his army of terminally online idiots.
3. If somehow we reached a point where Feinstein could NOT hire any staff capable of managing the remains of her Senate career, IT WOULD BE A FUCKING DISASTER. The Democrats need her vote; their margin in Judiciary and in the Senate as a whole is so thin that they can’t pretend that they can get by pretending that Feinstein doesn’t exist until she resigns or dies. She needs staffers to get her where she has to be in order to cast the votes that the Democrats need.
4. The Republicans are not at fault here. Politics is a contact sport, and if the GOP had made the mistake of allowing an incompetent candidate from a safe state to run for re-election every Democratic partisan in the country would be righteously screaming at Schumer to take advantage of that error.

There’s one villain here, and her name is Dianne Feinstein. She should not have run for re-election in an incredibly safe seat in 2018. We are now forced to live with what is at least an egregious error and at most deliberate perfidy. Engaging in the useless psychodrama that characterizes the relationship between Congressional staffers and the journalists who cover them (all of whom went to the same schools and travel in the same DC social circles) is worse than useless.

… I’d like to issue a warning to commenters to take extraordinary care with comments and jokes about the elderly, especially anything that approaches “unplugging” or some such. Every octogenarian faces unique challenges, and while I think a blanket “don’t run for the Senate in a safe state if you’re over 80” is appropriate, some of the comments I’ve seen go a touch too far.