California senator Dianne Feinstein died yesterday at age ninety, and mainstream media outlets are rushing to eulogize her. She deserves recognition — and it should go without saying that Feinstein’s death is sad for those close to her — but the hymns of praise miss her real significance. Celebrated as a “pragmatist,” Feinstein in fact helped remake the Democratic Party into a political vehicle for the very rich, and relatedly, the military-industrial complex.

Politico describes Feinstein’s mayoralty in San Francisco, from 1978 to 1988, as one of “healing.” While it’s true that she came into office during a crazy period — in 1978, San Francisco’s then-major, George Moscone, was assassinated along with supervisor Harvey Milk by fellow supervisor Dan White — her tenure only inflicted more devastation on the troubled city. As Bay Area leftist journalist Larry Bensky has written, she dutifully advanced the interests of the rich, allowing the real estate industry in particular to add “30 million soulless square feet” of downtown office construction, while neglecting the needs and neighborhoods of the working class.

The New York Times’s obituary calls her “a tough campaigner who sometimes took conservative positions.” Even the left-leaning Mother Jones — which is named after, well, Mother Jones! — got in on the festschrift, labeling Feinstein a “trailblazing Democrat” and citing their own 2017 feature on the senator, which quoted her friend Orville Schell calling her “the last bastion of bridge building in the Senate.”