Great New Link
Hey folks, I'm posting from my hometown library with a small but important update: the draftruss.org website is up! Check it out!
Thanks to Chuck and Eric from draftruss.org for mentioning it to me, and for linking to me in their blog section! All this momentum is really exciting!
posted by Dan K. @ 12:42 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
This is great! I'm glad to see that I wasn't the only one (or even the first) to say Feingold in 2008 after election day.
I'm a freshman at Georgetown U. who's originally from Milwaukee. On thefacebook.com, a college socializing site, Georgetown's Feingold in 2008 group has over 33 members (it shall grow), while UW-Madison's is in the hundreds. There is a lot of support on college campuses for Feingold... we'll volunteer all he needs.
-Dan Bingham-Pankratz
Dear fellow Feingold fans,
Here are two more pieces of interest relating to Feingold that have shown up in recent weeks.
Feingold wrote an article for Salon.com which is located at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/12/21/alabama/index.html .
And in the Boston Globe in its Christmas Eve edition appears an op-ed piece by Patrick Hart urging consideration of a Feingold presidency.
Yours in reform,
Charles
Dear fellow Feingold fans,
Neglected to post the link for the Boston Globe op-ed piece. It is located at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2004/12/24/what_about_feingold_in_2008/ .
Yours in reform,
Charles
Feingold's success should be not only inspirational but instructive for the party. Voters gave him six more years by a 12% margin while breaking only narrowly for John Kerry. It wasn't that they thought Feingold was more moderate (even Karl Rove, when asked by a Wisconsin reporter weeks before whether the so-called "most liberal Senator" was really to the left of Feingold, declined to answer). Looks like it was Russ Feingold who was more compellingly able to speak to the issues facing Wisconsin voters and to their better angels and greater hopes. Looks like Wisconsin voters recognize what Feingold does, and what the pundits don't: that being an independent is a very different task from being a moderate. That political courage isn't a matter of sometimes reading from the other party's talking points but of privileging allegiance to a set of values over capitulation to consensus, whether partisan or (as is too often the case) shared by powerbrokers in both parties. That meant standing for fair trade even as the Democratic party embraced NAFTA's global race to the bottom. That meant successfully building a majority for real steps, however tentative (and in a few cases, counterproductive), towards limiting the suffocation of democracy by money. And that meant standing in the shadow of September 11 for that which is strongest in the American tradition by breaking with all 99 of his colleagues and voting against the PATRIOT Act. Russ Feingold didn't run away from these votes when Tim Michels campaigned against them. He ran on them. And he won counties that John Kerry lost.
It's not the first election in which Feingold defied political prognostication. He won in 1992 against well-financed better-recognized opposition with ads patterned more on Michael Moore movies than conventional TV spots. He showed up at his opponents' mansions with a camera crew to ring their doorbells and ask for a debate (no response). He took viewers on a tour of his own home ("Here's the closet: Look, no skeletons"), including the garage door on which he'd painted his three campaign commitments: No out-of-state funding. Town meetings in every county of Wisconsin every year. And no pay raises while in the Senate (a twelve-year legacy recently celebrated by a conservative stalwart). Go watch those ads. And the latest batch as well. They're not just clever - they're courageous.
So is Russ Feingold. He publically criticized Kerry and Edwards both for voting for the Iraq War and for voting against the $87 billion. He's introduced or co-sponsored legislation to bar state and federal executions, use of permanent replacements during strikes, and drilling anywhere in the Great Lakes. He's voted against NAFTA, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the No Child Left Behind Act. He's cast a few bad votes. One was to confirm John Ashcroft as Attorney General; another was against scuttling impeachment proceedings against Clinton. He justified confirming Ashcroft, whose nomination he condemned, on the grounds that Presidents deserve the counsel of a cabinet of their own choosing. He justified his vote against halting impeachment on the grounds that the charges merited a full debate. Feingold voted against impeachment on both counts, though his comments were strongly - I would say unjustly - critical of Clinton's conduct. They do demonstrate a hearteningly high set of ethics standards for elected officials, even if unfortunately misapplied in the Clinton case. And as the Madison Capital Times observed when Gore announced his running mate, Feingold's criticism of Clinton's use of political power in the Lewinsky investigation was far more credible than Lieberman's self-serving reminders to America that sex outside of marriage is immoral.
After reading Feingold's comments on the impeachment, he strikes me as seeing the case in terms of the law. While the Republicans wanted to impeach Clinton because he was too popular of a Democrat, there was much about Clinton's behavior that was suspect.
Feingold seems to have looked at this case as not a defense of the Democratic Party, but a process of law. He appears not to have given priority to the President's party, but to whether his crimes were an impeachable offense. That's why he voted against scuttling the trial - he wanted the investigation to continue, bring the evidence out, then have Congress make a determination based on that.
That sounds like the attitude I'd like as President.
-Dan B-P
Thanks for running a blog dedicated to getting Russ to run in 08! I just wrote a post on my blog (dcwarren.com) about how Feingold would make a great candidate and minutes later found a ton of stories and websites online about a draft russ movement. This is great! Keep it up!
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