Feinstein in 2021 approached Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican who has represented South Carolina in the Senate since 2013, “stuck out her hand, and told him she had been rooting for him and was so happy to have him serving with her in the Senate,” according to a new book that Politico excerpted on Thursday. Scott and his staffers knew that “Feinstein had mistaken the South Carolinian for Raphael Warnock, the newly elected Democratic senator from Georgia,” and “played along.” Feinstein’s office declined comment when Politico published the excerpt, from Washington Post reporter Ben Terris’s The Big Break.
The incident, which appears in the book as part of a long section criticizing Feinstein’s racial politics, came one year before the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “colleagues worry Dianne Feinstein is now mentally unfit to serve.” According to the piece, Feinstein repeatedly had “no apparent recognition” she was repeating herself in conversations with colleagues, who “had to reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction.”
“It’s bad, and it’s getting worse,” one Democratic senator said of Feinstein’s condition.
[I don’t believe for a minute that this indicates racism on the part of Feinstein. But I also don’t believe for a minute that it would be covered as anything else *but* racism if Feinstein were a Republican. — Ed]
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