California’s senior senator urged her fellow Democrats to put all their energy into re-electing President Barack Obama and fight back the “radical” Republican agenda.
Speaking at the state’s Democratic convention, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Republicans have tried to dismantle the American dream and that the “Tea Party” members had no plans to create jobs or help the economic recovery.
“What I’ve seen in Washington – it’s the most difficult environment I’ve seen in American politics,” she said. “Made harder still by the far right wing and the Tea Party who have entered into the arena of politics with an agenda to cut government so it cannot serve the people. They are more radical and hostile to working people and more determined to undermine a Democratic president than the [Newt] Gingrich Congress in 1995. [They have a] more radical, ideological agenda to dismantle the social and economic safety net of our country.”
She also went after the 2012 budget plan that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) introduced and the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted in favor of in April. The plan would turn Medicare into a voucher-like program and make Medicaid a state block grant program. She criticized the plan for being a “concerted assault on women, seniors and working people” while continuing tax cuts for the country’s wealthiest Americans.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is wrong,” Feinstein said. “It must be stopped.”
Feinstein already has said she would be running for a fourth term in 2012, although she has yet to formally announce a campaign. She is expected to win re-election handily in the state with Republican strategists even admitting it would be difficult to defeat her.
“She is probably the most popular political brand in California,” GOP strategist Rob Stutzman, a top advisor to former gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, said in a Los Angeles Times article. “She’s a stateswoman, and is seen as a prominent leader in D.C. whether she is in a majority or minority. We’d love to defeat her, but she is taken seriously as a thoughtful leader.”
She narrowly defeated then-Rep. Michael Huffington in 1994, but since that race has gone on to win her re-election contests by wide margins – winning by 19 points in 2000 and by 24 points in 2006.
She recently reported having $4.3 million in cash on hand and has decent approval numbers, albeit several points lower than it was a year before her previous election campaign – in a March Field Poll her approval rating was 48 percent. In the same poll, about 46 percent of California voters said they were likely to re-elect her, while 42 percent said they were not.
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