"I tried to give her encouragement," Feinstein said. "I tried to talk to her after several of the major debates, to tell her how she had done and just to say, 'You looked great. You looked terrific.' "
After Obama's Super Tuesday surge, Feinstein embraced Clinton on the floor of the Senate. And when Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), an Obama backer, suggested in early March that Clinton should fold her tent, Feinstein publicly defended Clinton's right to keep fighting.
By early May, however, Feinstein had begun to openly worry about the bitter tone of the primary battle.
After Obama extended his delegate lead by defeating Clinton handily in the North Carolina primary and narrowly losing Indiana, Feinstein said she wanted to talk to Clinton about her strategy. "I think the race is reaching the point where there are negative dividends from it, in terms of strife within the party," she said at the time.
Later in May, Feinstein suggested that the two candidates should be on the same ticket.
This week, as Clinton's apparent reluctance to leave the race increased the consternation of Democratic officials, Clinton talked with Feinstein about sitting down with Obama.
"She wanted something that was private. She said, 'I can't go anywhere,' " Feinstein said.
The California senator told Clinton that she would happily offer the privacy of her home, which sits behind a fence on a street with no parking in a leafy section of Washington. And Obama, Feinstein said Friday, "was very gracious. He said he would go wherever, wherever Sen. Clinton wanted."
When the candidates arrived Thursday, "I received them, put them in the living room in two comfortable chairs facing one another" and went upstairs, said Feinstein. After about an hour, she said, Obama came out and said "Dianne, we're finished."
"I came down and said: 'Good night, everybody. I hope you had a good meeting.' They were both laughing, and that was it."
Feinstein said Friday that Clinton conducted herself well in the campaign.
But 39 years after she was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Feinstein said, women and men are still treated differently in politics. "Gender bias in this country," she said with sadness in her voice, "is alive and well."
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noam.levey@latimes.com
