Thursday, November 4, 2010

Feingold

Filed under: Democrats | Elections — by Will Kirkland @ 11:15 am
Tags: , ,

The vote in Wisconsin and the defeat of Russ Feingold is the most dispiriting outcome for me in a very dispiriting election.  It almost pushes me to quote my dear departed father, a half-life conservative Republican, to say, “People are just damned idiots.”  I can only hope, as I have hoped for the “independents” and Democrats who put Lieberman back into office two years ago in Connecticut, that the Wisconsinites who locked up their intelligence while voting for Ron Johnson, a plastics magnate with no elected experience, will be utterly embarrased by what they have done; more than that I hope some of them are personally affected, for the bad, by the votes he will cast.  Independents my bootie! Not independent of all the usual bad arguments and untested ideas.

The irony was lost on no one. Senator Russ Feingold, a liberal with a fierce streak of independence who crusaded against the influence of money in politics, was toppled Tuesday in a campaign awash in the kind of unregulated cash he had struggled to keep out of the system.

And in a poignant twist, the loss came, in part, because independents flocked to his opponent, despite Mr. Feingold’s record of one maverick vote after another.

He was the sole senator to oppose the Patriot Act after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He also broke with President Obama on several occasions, opposing the expansion of the war in Afghanistan, the bailing out of financial institutions in 2008 and the regulation of Wall Street this year, saying the restrictions did not go far enough.

Most prominently, he battled his colleagues to overhaul the campaign finance system; the resulting law, passed in 2002, bore his name and that of Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican (who won re-election Tuesday). After being eroded for years, the McCain-Feingold Act was gutted this year by the Supreme Court, opening the way for millions of dollars from outside anonymous groups to gush into campaigns — at least $4 million in Wisconsin, virtually all of it against Mr. Feingold, 57, or for his opponent, Ron Johnson, 55, a wealthy Republican businessman.

NY Times

Russ hasn’t said what he will do next, but it probably won’t be raising hamsters.  We should all hope he finds himself at the center of a left-side-of-the road driving neo Democratic machine.  We certainly need some GD messaging out there!

3 Comments »

  1. Bob Meyer:

    I continued to donate to Feingold’s campaign even after it was clear he had no chance of winning. I just couldn’t deal with the idea of his not being there. I still can’t….

  2. Will Kirkland:

    C’mon Bob, say something nasty about the voters!

  3. Bob Meyer:

    If I were going to say something nasty, it would be about us — for not creating a climate in which Russ Feingold could survive and continue to advocate for us. Feingold, true to his principles, not only didn’t take corporate contributions (stealth or otherwise), he also didn’t accept a dime from the DSCC (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) because he knew there were strings attached. It’s easy to pile on the voters, who are running scared shitless as their lives go down the drain with no help in sight, but Feingold’s progressive supporters (and I include myself) could have done a better job of making clear what was at stake — before the fact, not after — in the most important race of 2010.

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Words for Acts

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debt and taxes. And armies, debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few...No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

James Madison, 1795



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