Elected 1992, seat up 2006 Born: June 22, 1933, San Francisco Home: San Francisco Education: Stanford U., B.A. 1955 Religion: Jewish Marital Status: married (Richard C. Blum)

Career:

• Political: San Francisco Bd. of Supervisors, 1970-78, Pres., 1970-71, 1974-75, 1978; San Francisco Mayor, 1978-88.
• Professional: CA Women's Parole Bd., 1960-66.

DC Office: 331 HSOB 20510, 202-224-3841; Fax: 202-228-3954; Web site: www.senate.gov/~feinstein

State Offices: Fresno, 559-485-7430; Los Angeles,310-914-7300; San Diego,619-231-9712; San Francisco,415-393-0707.

Committees:

• Appropriations: Agriculture & Rural Development; Defense; Energy & Water Development; Interior; Military Construction (Chmn.).
• Energy & Natural Resources: Energy; Public Lands & Forests; Water & Power.
• Intelligence (Select).
• Judiciary: Crime & Drugs; Immigration; Technology, Terrorism & Government Information (Chmn.).
• Rules & Administration.

Dianne Feinstein, California's senior senator, has twice won far more popular votes than any other senator in American history. Feinstein grew up in San Francisco, in lush Presidio Heights, went to Stanford and later studied criminology. She was appointed by Governor Pat Brown to the women's parole board in 1960, at 27. In 1969 she was elected to the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors--the city's council--and twice ran for mayor and lost. As president of the board, she became mayor in 1978 when Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were murdered by former Supervisor Dan White; she discovered Moscone's body and showed steadiness and a sense of command that calmed the city. In 1984, Walter Mondale seriously considered her for vice president, but passed over her for Geraldine Ferraro because of qualms about the business dealings of her husband, Richard Blum. Feinstein presided gracefully that year over the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco--while Ferraro juggled questions about her family's business. In fact, Feinstein and Blum's investments have thrived; the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call estimated their net worth in 2001 at $50 million, the eighth highest in Congress. Some of Blum's investments were in businesses in China, which sparked attacks on Feinstein, a strong supporter of trade ties with China; in the 2000 campaign Blum said that he had divested all his China investments, though questions were raised about just when.

Feinstein left the mayor's office in 1987, ineligible for a third full term, and ran for governor in 1990. She won the Democratic primary impressively, then lost 49%-46% to Pete Wilson. When Wilson appointed Orange County state Senator John Seymour--an unknown and bland choice--to replace him in the Senate, Feinstein quickly announced for the seat, even though the 1992 race was for only the last two years of Wilson's term, and she could have run for the seat being vacated by Alan Cranston the same year. She had primary competition from Gray Davis, then state controller, who ran a spot against her campaign finance practices comparing her to Leona Helmsley; Feinstein won 58%-33% and one can assume that relations between her and Davis, now governor, are not entirely warm. In the general election nothing worked for the hapless Seymour--not his switches to pro-choice on abortion and anti-offshore oil drilling, not his attacks on Feinstein's arguably tricky financing of her 1990 gubernatorial campaign (which resulted in a $190,000 fine), not fears of immigration, not Seymour's tending to agricultural interests. Feinstein won 54%-38%, coming close even in Seymour's southern California base.

California has a long tradition of having one senator who expresses ideological views and another who works hard to represent the state's economic interests. Feinstein chose the latter workhorse role, as did her predecessors Wilson, Cranston and Thomas Kuchel. She got a seat on Appropriations, where she could funnel money to California, and on Judiciary, where she was one of the women chosen by then-chairman Joseph Biden, who sought to spare himself the flak he got for allowing cross-examination of Anita Hill. Feinstein has a generally but not uniformly liberal voting record; she also has a tough, prosecutorial demeanor, and on the podium she can be one of the best speakers in American politics today. She kept a certain distance from the Clinton administration, negotiating for changes before voting for the 1993 budget, voting against NAFTA, withdrawing her support of the Clinton health care plan in May 1994, condemning Bill Clinton's ''I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky'' comment which she had heard in person.

In her first two years she had two major legislative achievements. One was the attachment of the assault weapons ban to the 1994 crime bill--good politics for her and many Democrats in metropolitan states, but a liability to Democrats in much of the West and South. When Idaho's Larry Craig argued that her definition of assault weapons was not rigorous enough and challenged her knowledge of firearms, she responded by saying: ''I know something about what firearms can do; I came to be mayor of San Francisco as a product of assassination.'' Her other major achievement was a California Desert Protection Act. Similar measures had been stymied by the state's Republican senators as too restrictive, but now that there was no Republican senator, Feinstein managed it through enactment.

Feinstein surely hoped that she would face weak competition in 1994 and that her early and hard work raising money would enable her to win essentially unopposed. But then came Michael Huffington, with the determination and the cash to be the biggest spending Senate candidate, as of then. Huffington moved to Santa Barbara in 1991 and in 1992 beat an 18-year Republican congressman in the primary by spending over $3 million. His Senate campaign was lavishly financed--with nearly $30 million of his own money--and shrewd. When Feinstein ran an ad accusing him of refusing to act as an advocate for Raytheon, a company located in his district, he ran one arguing that her constituency service made her a ''career politician.'' Huffington pulled even in polls in September, and Feinstein was clearly flustered and angry that she could not count on heavily outspending him. Huffington slipped when it was revealed that he and his wife employed an illegal alien as a nanny. On the Thursday before the election, it was revealed that Feinstein, despite her earlier denials, had employed a woman whose work permit had expired; but the news media ran stories saying that federal officials cast doubt on whether the woman was an illegal. That probably made the difference. Feinstein won 47%-45%, carrying the Bay Area 63%-30% and Los Angeles County 52%-40%, while losing the rest of southern California 56%-35% and the north outside the Bay Area 51%-40%.

Feinstein has a moderate to liberal voting record, and has differed on quite a few issues from her colleague and Bay area neighbor Barbara Boxer; she sponsored the Y2K liability act opposed by trial lawyers, for example, and voted to repeal the marriage penalty and the estate tax. With Jon Kyl she has sponsored a victim's right constitutional amendment which has failed to get the needed two-thirds support and a bill to promote counterterrorism measures. She has continued to push for gun control measures, like a ban on the import of high-capacity ammunition clips, with less success than in 1994; in 2000 she introduced a bill to require licensing of all guns--something gun control opponents argue would lead to confiscation. She has co-sponsored bills to criminalize false identification on the Internet and identity theft. In October 2000 she amended the H1-B visa bill to require the INS to process H-1B and other non-immigrant visas within 30 days and naturalization and immigration visas within six months. Her bill, co-sponsored by Orrin Hatch, to allow disabled people to qualify for citizenship even if they can't take the oath became law in 2000. She amended the 2000 intelligence reauthorization to require declassification of records on Japanese atrocities committed between 1931 and 1945.

Feinstein has sponsored bills to ban denial of hospitalization for mastectomies, and with Kay Bailey Hutchison has co-sponsored the breast cancer stamp, with proceeds directed to cancer research. Like others on the feminist left, she opposed impeachment of Bill Clinton, but wrote a proposal to censure Clinton for "immoral and reckless behavior." That did not come to the floor, and she dropped it after the Senate voted for acquittal. She has supported various versions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, with reservations. She opposed anti-bundling provisions because they would hamper ideological PACs like EMILY's List. And, remembering her race against a self-financer in 1994, she has pushed for increasing the $1,000 limit on individual contributions which has not been adjusted for inflation since 1974. In March 2001 she and Fred Thompson passed an amendment raising it to $2,000.

When San Francisco and Shanghai became sister cities in 1979, Feinstein got to know Mayor Jiang Zemin, now President of China. She has been one of the most vocal supporters of renewing normal trade relations with China every year and of Permanent Normal Trade Relations in 2000. She argues that trade is driving political change in China and that if trade ties are cut China will just withdraw and remain dictatorial. "No matter how you look at it, this benefits the United States." With Russ Feingold, she has sought to remove patent protection from AIDS drugs in Africa. They threatened to filibuster the Africa free trade agreement in May 2000, and desisted only when the Clinton administration promised to issue an executive order waiving patent rights; in March 2001, after several pharmaceutical companies promised to make such drugs available in Africa at cost, she and Feingold called for writing the executive order into law.

In late 1997 Feinstein gave thought to running for governor, and delivered a speech stingingly criticizing California's public school system. Polls showed her the strongest Democratic candidate. But memories of past campaigns evidently deterred her: investor Al Checchi was spending much of his own fortune on the race, as Huffington had, and also running was Gray Davis, who had run those negative ads against her in 1992. She has continued to work on California issues, successfully brokering a deal for Pacific Lumber to sell redwood groves in the Headwaters Forest on the north coast, passing a Lake Tahoe cleanup bill, seeking $240 million to deal with buildup of forest fuels on federal lands and securing $4.2 million to refurbish the visitors' center at the Manzanar Internment Camp where Japanese Americans were held during World War II.

In 2000 Feinstein came up for reelection--her fourth statewide race in 10 years. The first Republicans to announce were Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose 1998 Proposition 227 ended the state's bilingual education program, state Senator Ray Haynes and San Diego County Supervisor Bill Horn--none of them a well-known figure. Then in October 1999 Congressman Tom Campbell got into the race, at which point Unz dropped out. Campbell is an unusual figure, a Stanford Law professor often called the brainiest member of Congress, with an unusual set of issue positions. He was elected to the House in 1988 and 1990, when Silicon Valley was much more hospitable country for Republicans; he ran for the Senate in 1992 and lost the Republican primary 38%-36% to conservative Bruce Herschensohn (many observers believe Campbell would have beaten Barbara Boxer in the fall); he then got elected to the state Senate in 1993 and to the House again in 1995. There Campbell voted against Newt Gingrich for speaker in January 1997; forced a vote on the Kosovo bombing in 1999 and then sued to stop it, unsuccessfully; took a conservative line on economics; and supported abortion rights. In 1999 and 2000 his big issue was drugs: he favored more treatment and less imprisonment, and called for use of heroin in drug treatments. This was scarcely Republican holy writ, but Campbell's name was more familiar and in the March 2000 all-party primary he won 56% of the votes cast for Republicans, to 22% for Haynes and 15% for Horn.

Ominously for Campbell, Feinstein, with only nominal Democratic opposition, won 51% of all votes cast to 41% for all the Republicans put together. From there on out Campbell did not get a break--except perhaps when Feinstein broke her leg in Aspen in September. Campbell spent only $4.8 million to Feinstein's $10.3 million, and his emphasis on the drug issue failed to make him inroads among Democrats. In October 1999 a poll showed Feinstein leading Campbell 55%-30%; in November 2000 she won 56%-37%. As in 1992, Feinstein led in all regions of the state and among practically every demographic group except white males. Campbell is back at Stanford. But House Republicans are miffed because the seat, which Campbell would surely have held on to, was lost to a Democrat.

Feinstein began her second full term by opposing John Ashcroft for attorney general--an early sign of solidarity among Senate Democrats--and by criticizing Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich and others. She dropped her bid for a Finance Committee seat because there was no assurance that the Appropriations seat she would have to relinquish would go to Boxer; evidently Appropriations ranking Democrat did not believe that California should be regarded as entitled to a seat. As California faced rolling blackouts of electricity, she and Boxer called for controls on wholesale electricity prices; this seemed unlikely to pass, and Feinstein and Oregon Republican Gordon Smith sponsored a bill giving FERC the choice between imposing price controls or setting cost-based rates to be passed along to consumers.

Group Ratings
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2000	70	57	57	86	2	100	20	54	28	20	15
1999	100	--	100	100	51	--	3	53	4	--	--

National Journal Ratings
	1999 LIB	--	1999 CONS		2000 LIB	--	2000 CONS
Economic	68%	--	29%		60%	--	39%
Social	88%	--	0%		66%	--	21%
Foreign	87%	--	0%		72%	--	15%

Key Votes of the 106th Congress
1. Educ. Savings Accts. Y 2. Prescrip. Drug Benefit Y 3. Delay Ergonomic Standards N 4. Phase Out Estate Tax Y 5. Review Movie Violence N 6. Gun Show Bckgrnd. Checks Y		7. Ban Part.-Birth Abortion N  8. Broaden Hate Crimes List Y  9. NATO War in Serbia Y 10. Table Cuba Travel Ban N 11. Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Y 12. Perm. Trade with China Y

Election Results
2000 general	Dianne Feinstein (D)	5,932,522	(56%)
	Tom Campbell (R)	3,886,853	(37%)
	Others	804,233	(8%)
2000 primary	Dianne Feinstein (D)	3,759,560	(52%)
	Tom Campbell (R)	1,697,208	(23%)
	Ray Haynes (R)	679,034	(9%)
	Bill Horn (R)	453,630	(6%)
	Others	759,405	(10%)
1994 general	Dianne Feinstein (D)	3,977,063	(47%)
	Michael Huffington (R)	3,811,501	(45%)
	Other	714,500	(8%)

Campaign Finance
2000	Receipts	Receipts from PACs	Expenditures
Dianne Feinstein (D)	$10,464,194	$1,245,727	$10,346,170
Tom Campbell (R)	$4,733,507	$11,600	$4,378,283