Russ Feingold, the Senate's True Maverick

When Russ Feingold jogs onto the stage of the Barrymore Theatre on a
Friday night in Madison, Wisconsin, a thousand old-school
progressives--not liberals avoiding the L-word but heart-and-soul
believers in a political ethic that traces back to the trustbusters and
anti-imperialists of a century ago--rise to cheer the living embodiment
of their faith. The three-term senator speaks to them in the language of
another time in America, when populists shouted from the backs of farm
wagons and urban radicals mounted soapboxes to spread the social gospel.
"There is no institution in our society that is safe from the power and
greed and corruption of these corporations," rages Feingold, who speaks
against the warping of foreign policy by military contractors, the
molding of the national debate by consolidated media and the pay-to-play
politics of business interests, before lowering his voice for a
dramatic declaration: "Now, after they attacked the media, the Congress
and the executive branch, they have managed to corrupt the US Supreme
Court."

Echoing former Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, whose memory he
has come to honor with activists from across the state, the only senator
to vote against the Patriot Act says he knows there are reasons to fear
big government. "But," he adds, in a speech that decries the High
Court's decision to let corporations spend as they choose on elections,
"there is one thing that's worse: government controlled by, dominated
by, corporate special interest."

For Feingold, though he is locked in a brutal battle with a
free-spending millionaire Republican who cloaks allegiance to Wall
Street in the populist rhetoric of the Tea Party, the essential question
of the moment has less to do with party politics than with the money
that's turning the major parties into two sides of one corporate coin.
His re-election fight is being covered by much of the national media as
just another partisan horse race, one of several in which senior
Democratic senators, like California's Barbara Boxer and Washington's
Patty Murray, are in unexpectedly tough re-election struggles that could
determine whether their party retains control of the Senate. But
Feingold's race raises more basic questions about how much our politics
are becoming nationalized and homogeneous, about whether the parties are
more than mere extensions of sitting presidents or in opposition to
them, about whether there is a place for the independent man or woman of
principle--especially one who rejects the dictates of Wall Street and
multinational corporations--in an increasingly managed and manipulated
Senate.

Feingold has taken these questions on the road in a campaign that is like no other this year. With the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
ruling opening the floodgates for special-interest spending, the
Senate's fiercest campaign finance reformer says the Court is "turning
our system of government and our democracy into another example of what
is essentially corporate naming rights."

"What do they want us to do: choose between Republican toothpaste and
Democratic toothpaste?" asks Feingold over an approving roar from the
crowd that has gathered on a late summer night. The progressive faithful
are with him, but the polls show Feingold struggling to keep even with
GOP businessman Ron Johnson, who has pledged to spend as much as $15
million on a campaign so carefully plotted to exploit frustration with
President Obama, fears about the economy and anger at Washington that it
appears to have been squeezed from Karl Rove's tube. The contrast is
sufficiently stark that the result on November 2, no matter what happens
elsewhere in the country, will tell us something about the politics of
our era.

Everything about Feingold's Senate career has been a fight against a
future where Crest Democrats do battle with Colgate Republicans. More
than his sometime ally John McCain, the man from Wisconsin is the
Senate's true maverick. And unlike McCain, whose "independence" always
had about it an air of self-absorption and attentiveness to the media,
Feingold has never been a maverick for the sake of being a maverick. His
eighteen years in the Senate have been defined by a steadiness of
commitment that pays little regard to presidents or parties.

Feingold opposed Bill Clinton's North American Free Trade Agreement
and normalization of trade with China; he opposed George W. Bush's
Central American Free Trade Agreement; now he is challenging attempts by
the Obama administration to advance trade policies that do too much for
multinational corporations and too little for workers and farmers here
and abroad. Feingold was the leading Senate critic of Clinton's failure
to abide by the War Powers Act; he opposed Bush's rush to war in Iraq
and was the first senator to call for a timeline to bring the troops
home; now he complains that the Obama administration is not moving fast
enough to wind that war down. Feingold noisily challenged constitutional
abuses during the Clinton and Obama years, and as chair of the Senate
Judiciary Committee's Constitution subcommittee, he is pressing the
Obama administration to get serious about civil liberties. Feingold
opposed Clinton's proposal to loosen bank rules, arguing that doing so
could threaten financial stability; he opposed Bush's bank bailout; and
he was the sole Democrat to object that the reforms Obama backed did not
go far enough because they did not do away with "too big to fail" banks
and did not adequately protect consumers or taxpayers.

Much has been made this election season of Democrats distancing
themselves from Obama; but Feingold and the president parted company
years ago. The Illinoisan said during his 2004 Senate campaign that he
saw Feingold as a role model. But once in the Senate, Obama kept clear
of Feingold's effort to censure Bush over abuses of privacy rights and
the Wisconsinite's lonely defense of arms control treaties. Feingold
cast his Wisconsin primary vote in 2008 for Obama over Hillary Clinton,
and he backed Obama's economic stimulus and healthcare reform. But he
opposed Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, objected to Obama's plan
to surge more troops into Afghanistan and has complained loudly about
the administration's uneven response to soaring unemployment.

This independent streak has frustrated Democrats who don't "get"
Feingold's votes. He's not a movement politician, in the sense that his
friend and frequent ally former Senator Paul Wellstone, was; while
Wellstone worked with liberals when they said they needed him to take
the lead in challenging conservative overreach in fights about the
impeachment of Bill Clinton or the nomination of John Ashcroft as
attorney general, Feingold cast the sole Democratic vote to continue
Clinton's Senate trial and argued, based on their joint service on the
Judiciary Committee, that Ashcroft was more respectful of the
Constitution than anyone else George Bush would pick. Those votes
infuriated interest groups and Democratic leaders in Congress. But many
Feingold backers share the opinion of Wisconsin union activist Terry
Fritter, who says, "A lot of people get mad at Russ when he casts one of
those 'only Democrat' votes. Then they calm down and think, if Russ did
it, there had to be a principle involved."

Over time, Feingold's antiwar and anticorporate record, as well as
his defense of civil liberties, have made him a hero to progressive
populists. "Russ is not shy about taking on the forces of arrogance and
ignorance in my party," says author and activist Jim Hightower. Since
the death of Wellstone, says Hightower, "Feingold's the one Democrat I
don't have to apologize for." Unfortunately, Feingold's independence
isn't inspiring the enthusiasm it once did among Wisconsin swing voters.
He's running well with Democrats, but polls have him trailing among
unaffiliated voters. And Republicans give him no more credit than they
do party-line Democrats. "Politics are more partisan now, more cynical,"
says former Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager. "You used to
hear people say, 'I don't agree with him on the issues, but he's his
own man' or 'I'm not a Democrat, but I'm proud of him.' Now a lot more
people are in their camps; they don't want to think someone on the other
side might be honorable."

Lautenschlager's words apply not just in Wisconsin but nationally.
Bush's Iraq War, abuses of civil liberties and failed economic policies
have resulted in growing division between the two major parties. Rhode
Island Democrats and independents, furious with Bush and Senate GOP
leaders, refused to vote as they once had for liberal Republican Lincoln
Chafee in 2006. Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter stopped believing
that Democrats would cross over and vote for him, and Delaware
Congressman Mike Castle learned--after his Senate primary defeat at the
hands of a Tea Party firebrand--that there are no longer many moderates
voting in GOP primaries. The remarkably unified "Party of No" response
to Obama's initiatives by Congressional Republicans, combined with the
relentless assault by right-wing media on Democrats and
compromise-oriented "RINOs" (Republicans in Name Only), appears to have
fostered an edgy and unforgiving partisanship even in states where
ticket-splitting was once common. This explains the devolution of McCain
on issues ranging from immigration to climate change; it also explains
why Chuck Grassley, who once served as a reasonably rational "Bob Dole
Republican" (working with Democrat Tom Harkin to enact the Americans
With Disabilities Act), is now best known for repeating absurd claims
about "death panels."

The bitter divisions over the Bush and Obama presidencies have
highlighted longer-term shifts in the makeup and dynamics of the Senate.
When Feingold arrived in Washington, regional differences and personal
styles were still very much on display in what were far more
ideologically diverse party caucuses. The Senate's most consistently
antiwar member in the early 1990s was a Republican, Oregon's Mark
Hatfield, who also happened to be a steady foe of the death penalty,
school prayer and discrimination against gays and lesbians. There were
more conservative Democrats from the South in those days, but there were
also Southern Democratic populists like Fritz Hollings, who backed
Jesse Jackson for president in 1988 and often sounded like Ralph Nader
when talking about corporate power. New England Republicans weren't the
faint hopes represented by the likes of Maine's Susan Collins; they were
proud independents like Rhode Island's John Chafee, one of the biggest
backers of moves to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income children and
pregnant women. When the Senate debated whether to ban flag-burning,
there were votes when more Republicans opposed the assault on freedom of
expression than Democrats.

Feingold has seen the Senate grow more partisan and dysfunctional
since the days when McCain crossed the aisle and asked the young
reformer from Wisconsin to help him squeeze soft money out of national
politics. The men and women of principle, the outliers who cast
unexpected votes and who forged unlikely coalitions, have mostly been
replaced by programmed politicians who dare not deviate from party
talking points. The late Senator Robert Byrd--Feingold's ally in
resisting the steady creep of executive power--worried aloud in his last
years about the way the "history and tradition of being the world's
greatest deliberative body is being snubbed."

Yet it is not merely an increasingly White House-focused politics--and
the media that reinforce it--that has changed the character of the
Senate. The most significant change has been in the way senators get
elected and re-elected. In 1992, when Feingold first ran, most races
cost millions, with only a few costing tens of millions. Candidates
rarely relied entirely on home-state donors, but it was still possible
to suggest that most politics was local. Now serious Senate
contenders--if they are not independently wealthy--count on massive
spending by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the
National Republican Senatorial Committee, which collected $162 million
and $94 million, respectively, in 2008, and on the myriad
special-interest groups that have wildly inflated the cost of getting
elected. And those staggering figures do not take into account the
enormous spending by supposedly independent groups. The "money power,"
as Feingold's progressive forebears referred to it, has redefined Senate
races and senators. "In most cases, candidates no longer control their
own campaigns," says Ed Garvey, who once sought Feingold's seat and over
the past quarter-century has been a leading campaign finance reform
activist. "Even candidates who get into politics with the best of
intentions start thinking they can't get re-elected without money from
the party leaders, from the people in Washington, to keep their jobs.
Senators get so reliant on the money that they reflect it; they stop
thinking for themselves, stop thinking like the people who elected them.
They just worry about getting the money."

More than any current senator, Feingold has resisted the march of
money, not merely by fighting for campaign finance reform but by trying
to get opponents to agree to limit spending and keep special-interest
groups from pouring money into Wisconsin. But his opponent, Johnson,
secured the GOP nomination with a promise to use his family fortune to
mount one of the most expensive TV ad campaigns in Wisconsin history.
Johnson's ads not only distort Feingold's record on specific issues but
foster the fantasy that the only Democrat to oppose Obama's mild banking
reforms is a rubber-stamp for president and party. "Russ Feingold
normally and almost always votes on party lines," claims a Johnson TV
ad. "He's right in the Reid, Pelosi, Obama camp." The claim is
absurd--Feingold crosses party lines more frequently than all but six
senators. But the relentless attacks have had an impact; Johnson pulled
even with Feingold in summer polls, and the race moved from a "safe
Democratic" rating to one of the year's most competitive. That's certain
to steer more corporate money into Wisconsin. Karl Rove says he expects
to raise $50 million to defeat Democrats, and Democracy 21's Fred
Wertheimer says, "Shadow Republican groups formed by longtime party
officials and party operatives are raising and spending hundreds of
millions of dollars in this election."

So it is that Russ Feingold finds himself in the fight of his life.
He has built a campaign fund of almost $14 million the hard way: with an
average contribution of $53. In the past, that would have been more
than sufficient to keep the poorest Democrat in the Senate competitive.
But not this year, in the aftermath of Citizens United, with
corporate money flowing more freely than ever before. Corporate-allied
groups like the Club for Growth are already buying heavily to attack
Feingold and support Johnson.

Feingold's sure he'll be outspent. But he's also sure he'll win. A
political junkie whose father was active in Wisconsin's independent
Progressive Party of the 1930s and '40s before becoming a Democratic
stalwart in the factory town of Janesville, Feingold is betting it's
still possible to counter organized money with organized people.
Borrowing a page from Wellstone's remarkable re-election races of 1996
and 2002, Feingold is determined to "win this campaign at the
grassroots." To that end, he has opened sixteen field offices, from
Ashland on the shores of Lake Superior to Kenosha on the Illinois
border. Twenty-seven regional steering committees have taken his
campaign into the most rural counties. By early September, canvassers
had knocked on more than 105,000 doors and made more than 107,000 phone
calls to targeted voters. Feingold is doing much of the asking himself,
keeping to a relentless schedule that sends him to the state's most
Republican counties to compare notes on the Constitution with
conservatives, who don't see many Democrats these days.

The tech-savvy Feingold campaign has 25,000 Facebook friends and
11,000 Twitter followers. Supporters even download "Feintunes"--the
senator's picks of songs by Wisconsin artists like Bon Iver and the
BoDeans. Yet while he embraces the bells and whistles of modern
campaigning, Feingold is betting more on message than mechanics. "I
still think people understand," he says, that they need senators willing
to stand up to "the power and greed and corruption of Wall Street...the
power and greed and corruption of the pharmaceutical companies...the
power and greed and corruption of the health insurance companies."
Feingold is counting on that understanding to see him through a year
when more cautious Democrats may not make it. He says that like the
progressives of old, he wants to beat the "money power" in this race so
he can go back and fight it in the Senate. "I want you to know that I am
committed to this cause because I think it goes to the very core of our
democracy," the senator declared on that Friday night when he rallied
the faithful.

"You do it, Russ!" came a shout from the crowd.

If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not
be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor
even as an idealist. It will be as a signal that maybe, just maybe,
people power can still beat the money power. That senators aren't just
extensions of parties and presidents, and that politics can be about
something more than Democratic toothpaste versus Republican toothpaste.