Campaign 2000.

Princess Di-Fi

A senator's prospects.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein goes way back with Chinese president Jiang Zemin. They first met in 1985 as the mayors of San Francisco and Shanghai, which are sister cities. They have since visited each other repeatedly, once even hitting the dance floor together.

Today Feinstein is one of China's leading allies in Washington. When the issue is trade, Feinstein will push hard for no limits. When it's human rights, she will equivocate to the point of comparing China's massacre of hundreds in Tiananmen Square to the four shooting deaths at Kent State, as she did in 1997. "More people vote in China today than do in the United States," she said later that year, referring to 300 million Chinese who had cast ballots in village elections.

The Chinese know they have a friend in her. Three years ago, Feinstein dined with Jiang in what had been Mao's private residence, and later she received a special tour. "We were told that we were the first foreigners to see his bedroom and the swimming pool," Feinstein gushed to the Los Angeles Times. "It was a very historic moment to see some of these things." Feinstein has not risen quite as far in her country's political system as Jiang has in his, but the senior senator from California has come a long way from City Hall. The next time they get together, however, Feinstein probably will wonder whether Jiang's friendship is blocking the biggest step of her career.

With Vice President Al Gore looking like a lock for the nomination, speculation already has turned to his running mate. Over the next year, Feinstein will be on Gore's mind. When it appeared last fall that the Lewinsky scandal might force Bill Clinton from office, many Democrats believed that a President Gore would choose Feinstein as his vice president, as she, like Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, had distanced herself from the White House. Interest in her never died down. She is mentioned as a Gore ticketmate more often than any other contender. Washingtonian magazine gave 4-to-1 odds that Gore would pick her, and no other potential vice-presidential nominee came close.

Several factors weigh strongly in Feinstein's favor. Her home state holds almost a fifth of the electoral votes needed for victory, and Republicans appear eager to compete for them in 2000. Some polls suggest that Gore doesn't run as well among female voters as Clinton. And he may be in even deeper trouble if Elizabeth Dole winds up on the GOP ticket. Gore may ultimately believe he has no choice but to select a woman. And who besides Feinstein is he going to pick-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire?

The 65-year-old Feinstein is viewed as a moderate who won't alarm suburbanites. Despite an overall liberal voting record-she has never met an abortion restriction she liked and was one of only 14 senators to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act-Feinstein has a reputation for pragmatism. She was once booed by California Democrats at their state convention for supporting the death penalty. She then shrewdly turned this Sister Souljah-like experience into an effective campaign commercial. In 1995, she met secretly with activist Glynn Custred to discuss the possibility of endorsing the anti-racial-preferences initiative that would become Proposition 209 (she came out against it a year later). In 1998, she served as the honorary co-chairman of the retention campaign for the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, Ron George, a Republican.

Compared with California's other senator, Barbara Boxer, Feinstein certainly looks like a centrist. She has even flirted with tax cuts at a time when most Democrats feel safe opposing them. On March 2, she announced with Republican senator Charles Grassley a plan to reduce taxes by $200 billion over 10 years. Says Sacramento-based GOP consultant Tony Quinn: "If she had been born in Orange County, she'd have the same views and be a moderate Republican."

Walter Mondale interviewed Feinstein to be his running mate in 1984. He eventually picked Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, though, making history by selecting the first female vice-presidential nominee but also creating a headache for himself because of her husband's controversial business deals. If Gore selects Feinstein, he can expect similar problems.

Feinstein is one of the wealthiest members of Congress, thanks to her husband, the San Francisco-based merchant banker Richard C. Blum. Last year, their financial-disclosure form ran 82 pages. Blum invests more than $1 billion for himself and others, and has interests in companies ranging from Northwest Airlines to Oshkosh B'Gosh. During the 1980s-shortly after Feinstein arranged sister-city ties with Shanghai-Blum started making substantial investments in China.

Although there are no signs of impropriety on Feinstein's part, it's hard to believe Blum's repeated claim that he has not traded on his wife's political influence. When Feinstein travels to China, Blum often accompanies her at his own expense. He then sits in on meetings with Jiang and others. The Chinese have a word for this: guanxi. Loosely translated, it means social relations. Business success in China requires plenty of it, and Blum has it to burn, courtesy of his wife.

In 1986, Feinstein and Jiang teamed up to create corporations that would encourage business between San Francisco and Shanghai. Blum became a director of one of these groups, Shanghai Pacific Partners. Feinstein even promoted the company in a 1987 article for the San Francisco Business Times. The Shanghai government then launched a joint venture with Blum to construct a $30 million, 28-story apartment building. Blum says he lost money on the deal, but the experience hardly turned him off to sending good money after bad-more than $100 million in various Chinese investments since his wife became a senator, in fact.

A series of press inquiries two years ago into Blum's overseas investments started singeing Feinstein as she contemplated running for governor. Blum then announced that he would give all his personal profits from Chinese investments to the American Himalaya Foundation, a non-profit group that helps Tibetan refugees. "This doesn't pass the smell test," says one GOP congressman. "If he really cared about Tibet, he wouldn't associate himself with Communist oppressors."

Blum has caused trouble for his wife before. In 1990, he loaned $3 million to her unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign. The campaign reported it improperly, which brought a $190,000 state fine. California governor Gray Davis, who battled Feinstein for the Democratic Senate nomination in 1992, compared her to tax cheater Leona Helmsley. As a senator, Feinstein has approved appropriations bills sending hundreds of millions of dollars to companies with heavy Blum investments, including defense contractors and a job-training company. Larry McCarthy, a media consultant who worked on Michael Huffington's 1994 challenge to Feinstein, argues these apparent conflicts of interest were a major Feinstein vulnerability (meanwhile, Huffington had spouse trouble of his own-Arianna's nanny problem).

Gore might have still other reasons to skip Feinstein. Could a Jewish woman from San Francisco-especially one who once participated in a lesbian "solemnization" ceremony-win votes in Alabama? There is even some evidence she won't run well in California. Lawyers for California secretary of state Bill Jones, a Republican, say that Feinstein can run both for senator and for vice president in 2000, but this electoral two-timing probably won't help. Her statewide races have not been cakewalks, and one private GOP poll from earlier this year shows that a dual candidacy hurts her dearly.

The biggest problem, of course, is the Chinese connection. Gore is already saddled with controversy over Chinese campaign contributions. And it's possible that the only politician more damaged than Gore by the latest spy revelations is Feinstein. By next summer, she could be radioactive. So perhaps Fritz Mondale knew what he was doing after all.