Washington (AFP) - Dianne Feinstein stands astride US politics as one of the most accomplished women in history, having pioneered numerous indelible legislative achievements during a trailblazing 30-year career in the Senate.
The veteran Democrat has survived an attempted bombing of her home and a gruesome brush with death in San Francisco, where she became the first female mayor after a double murder at City Hall.
Yet as she turns 89 next month, recently-widowed Feinstein is no longer the revered figure she once was, amid growing misgivings about her declining cognitive abilities raised by figures in her own party.
Concerns over her apparently failing memory are not new, but an article published in April by her hometown paper the San Francisco Chronicle has raised fresh questions about her ability to serve.
Several lawmakers and former staffers spoke anonymously to raise the alarm about Feinstein's troubles following complicated discussions and even fully recognizing longtime associates on difficult days.
The Chronicle quoted a California Democrat in Congress who had known Feinstein for years but had to reintroduce themselves repeatedly during a "jarring" conversation in February.
"It's true the last year has been difficult, caring for my dying husband and grieving over his passing, but I've remained committed to achieving results and I would put my record up against anyone's," Feinstein said in a statement sent by her office to AFP.
Most of the episodes described by Feinstein's former staff played out in private, but she was in front of the nation's TV cameras when she suffered an embarrassing lapse in November 2020.
Plunging popularity
Feinstein was questioning Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at a judiciary committee hearing about the role of social media in the presidential election when she asked him about a tweet by Donald Trump, apparently unaware that she had just put the same question to him, word for word.
It was a far cry from Feinstein's image only a few years earlier as a titan of Senate politics who took the lead on hundreds of bills and rose to the chairmanship of the powerful intelligence committee -- another first for a woman.
Her achievements include writing the 1994 assault rifle ban and producing a 6,700-page report on the CIA torture program during the US "war on terror."
But it was in her home state of California where she first made her mark.
As the first female Board of Supervisors president in San Francisco, Feinstein led the city through the tumult that followed the fatal shootings in 1978 of Harvey Milk, the country's only openly-gay politician, and mayor George Moscone by a disgruntled former colleague.
She replaced the mayor and served for 10 years as a no-nonsense pragmatist, willing to work across the aisle, balancing nine budgets in a row and being declared the nation's "Most Effective Mayor" by local government bible City and State Magazine.
Latterly, the pandemic and her husband's declining health have curtailed Feinstein's public appearances outside of Congress, but any cover that gave her has not helped her plunging popularity.
A March survey from the Public Policy Institute of California found that Feinstein had a job approval rating of 36 percent among likely voters, a drop of 15 points from five years earlier.
Term limits?
She has not yet announced whether she intends to run again in 2024, but if Democrats hold on to the Senate this year, she will be third in line for the presidency as the body's "president pro tempore."
Her travails have prompted calls for term limits that would bring down the average age in the US Senate, where almost a third of members are 70 or over.
Asked by reporters in April about Feinstein's memory lapses, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer appeared to acknowledge the issue, without clarifying whether he saw it as a problem.
"I've had a good number of discussions with Senator Feinstein but I'm keeping them to myself," Schumer told reporters.
Feinstein's defenders frame the controversy as a sexist double standard in the Senate, where numerous men stay on well into their 80s without receiving the same attention.
Josh Wilson, a PR expert and former communications director in the US House of Representatives, points out that Feinstein is not much older than President Joe Biden, who joins her as an octogenarian in the fall.
"Clearly, Americans do not see age as an issue.Bottom line -- this is between the voters and their senators," Wilson told AFP.
Rachel Roberts, a Democratic state representative in Kentucky, told AFP she had changed her mind after initially believing term limits would be a good thing.
"I often explain it like this: 'Career politician' has a negative connotation.But you wouldn't want a non-career surgeon operating on you or a non-career accountant filing your taxes, would you?" she said.
"There is a need for institutional knowledge in the political sphere and elections can absolutely impose term limits by not re-electing someone."
