That's a serious admission of defeat for the left, wouldn't you say?

Coming from Dianne, especially. She may be a lefty, but she's a really smart one. If she's willing to back off, she knows it's in her party's best interests not to push a filibuster and, more to the point, it's in her political best interests to play "the voice of reason".

She's also got a lot of stored political capital back in Kalifornia to help ward off some of the malevolence she'll undoubtedly draw from some of the extreme left groups out there for not supporting a filibuster.

More to the point, if I'm not mistaken, Dianne's donor base, unlike many of her colleagues, does not come from the far-left, freeing her to take a more "centrist" position.

Dianne has a lot of far left support as well, CT.

The Bay Area, which was her springboard to the Senate, is filled with extremely wealthy people of whom you don't hear much who are very far to the left and who let their money do the talking, backing every wingnut org that comes down the pike, and in one way and another, Feinstein gets her slices of those pies when it's time to run for reelection, just as do her colleagues.

I was somewhat imprecise, and we're probably thinking along similar lines. What I was trying to state, which you clarified well, was that Dianne is not dependent on extreme left organizations such as MoveOn.org or Soros's groups for financial backing because she has her own family wealth (she and her spouse) and loyal wealthy individuals.

It's a very different dynamic when you need to placate individuals who stay more in the background (as you pointed out) rather than organizations that need to continually be pushing positions of calculated outrage in an effort to attract attention in order to try to gain an advantage in the competition for donations.

This is precisely why on an issue like Alito's confirmation, Dianne can take a more nuanced position rather than having to walk the plank on behalf of MoveOn.org, etc.

True, CT --

A significant portion of her fortune was made from real estate investments back when she was mayor.