Rataj Berard
On the floor of the U.S. Senate, less than a month after newcomer Ron Johnson unseated Russ Feingold, a prominent conservative delivered an emotional send-off to his departing colleague.
“I have to confess, I think the Senate will be a much poorer place without Russ Feingold in it,” said Sen. John McCain of Arizona. “I can’t do justice...or express completely, how much I think this institution benefited from his service here. And how much I benefited from knowing him.”
The GOP senator and Feingold were loyal allies on reforming campaign financing and eliminating wasteful spending. But on most issues they were fundamentally opposed. “We couldn’t be further apart on our views on Iraq and Afghanistan,” McCain said. “But we traveled there together as well to gain knowledge that would inform our views and challenge them.”
“I will try harder to become half the public servant that he is,” McCain added, stifling tears. “Because his friendship is an honor. And honors come with responsibilities.”
But in 2010, Wisconsin voters weren’t interested in giving a clean-government reformer another six-year term to “fight the good fight.”
Five years after being upset by Ron Johnson, Russ Feingold wants his old seat back. But have the rules of the game changed?
Feingold faces a different political landscape than when he left office. Wisconsin has become more polarized under Gov. Scott Walker, and the U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission has unleashed a torrent of unregulated campaign spending not seen in several generations.
The former senator credits Citizens United with spawning budget deals that protect tax cuts for the wealthy but diminish benefits for people who have worked hard all their lives. Feingold sees it as the central political fight of his era.
“I’m determined not only to fight that decision,” says Feingold, “but to fight the effects of it.”
Victory won’t come cheap or easy for either candidate. Millions of dollars are being lined up for what’s likely to be the most expensive U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin history. “Money means pretty much means everything,” says U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison). “That’s part of why the process is so bad.”
But political watchdog Mike McCabe, founder of Blue Jean Nation, is wary of making too much of the post-Citizens United landscape, saying it’s still possible to win elections with a strong grassroots campaign. He sees Feingold’s victory in his first U.S. Senate race in 1992 as the key to reclaiming the seat in 2016.
Feingold was an underdog in the primary against Congressman Jim Moody and millionaire construction magnate Joe Checota and was outspent by both. But he captured almost 70% of the vote. In the general election, Feingold unseated two-term incumbent Bob Kasten.
“In 1992, Feingold broke the mold,” McCabe says. “There was nothing else like it in Wisconsin and it captured the public’s imagination. That catapulted Feingold to the status that he enjoyed for a good many years.”
But he will have to battle charges that he is not the same man Wisconsin first elected in 1992. “After 30 years in politics, Sen. Feingold has changed,” says Brian Reisinger, a spokesperson for Johnson’s campaign. “Sen. Feingold has shown time and again that he’ll violate his principles on the issue that’s most important to him — campaign finance reform — which means he’ll do the same on issues important to the people of Wisconsin.”
A framed poster of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington used to hang in Feingold’s Capitol office in the Hart Senate Building. The 1939 classic starring Jimmy Stewart tells the story of an unlikely senator’s refusal to be beaten by a corrupt political machine that controls party leaders, the levers of government and the media. It was an apt symbol for Feingold.
“He’s always been a politician that considers the impact of his vote on people,” says John Matthews, longtime president of the union Madison Teachers Inc. “Those kinds of politicians are few and far between.”
Feingold’s 18-year tenure was marked by independent stands. When President Bill Clinton was facing impeachment, Feingold was the only Democrat who voted against dismissing the charges before witnesses were heard. He refused to accept soft-money campaign spending, even during a tight reelection fight against Republican Mark Neumann in 1998. Feingold was the only Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of nominating John Ashcroft as U.S. attorney general.
What sealed Feingold’s reputation as a principled maverick was his lonely vote against the USA Patriot Act just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. From the floor, he gave a prophetic speech against the new surveillance powers only fully realized a decade later.
Feingold says a lot of the provisions in the USA Patriot Act were for the FBI’s War on Drugs, not terror.
“It was a sleight of hand in many ways,” Feingold says. “It can be fixed, but it hasn’t been fixed. There was a bit of progress but only a bit, and we still have a lot of privacy threatened.”
Feingold considers protecting civil liberties among his chief responsibilities if the voters return him to the Senate.
“I can’t imagine anything more important than protecting our constitutional rights and our privacy,” says Feingold. “As Americans, we really value our individualism...we value the opportunity to speak, think and read what we want and to not have the government oversee what we do.”
It wasn’t just Russ Feingold who was swept out of office in 2010.
“It was a terrible year for Democrats everywhere; it was disastrous,” says UW-Madison political scientist Ken Mayer. “It was the biggest loss in the House for the president’s party since 1938.”
A “throw the bums out” mentality, fueled by the emergence of the tea party, cost the Democratic Party 69 seats in Congress, giving Republicans control of the House and withering the Democrats’ majority in the Senate.
Feingold fared slightly better than the other top-ticket Democrat on the ballot. Gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett received 16,000 fewer votes than Feingold in his race against Walker, suggesting that at least some voters cast ballots for both Walker and Wisconsin’s iconic progressive.
“Was it something Feingold did?” ponders Mayer. “Or was it that he was just the next duck that came up in the gallery?”
Reisinger, Johnson’s campaign spokesperson, counters that his boss won because voters were tired of professional politicians. “Ron was successful in 2010 because the people of Wisconsin shared his concern with the direction of our country,” he says. “Reckless spending, burdensome regulations stifling the private sector and the damage Obamacare was about to do to our economy and personal freedoms were issues many Wisconsin families were worried about.”
Even some progressives fault Feingold for losing. “[Feingold’s] campaign in 2010 felt cookie-cutter,” says McCabe. “It looked and felt like pretty much every other campaign out there.”
What’s worse, Feingold lost in 2010 despite having outspent Johnson, a political novice who ponied up $8.2 million of his own wealth for the campaign. The Citizens United decision had yet to be handed down but the race was still the most expensive U.S. Senate campaign in Wisconsin history.
For the first time in 29 years, Feingold was a private citizen.
In January 2011, Marquette University Law School announced Feingold would teach a course on “Current Legal Issues: The U.S. Senate.” Feingold has also taught classes examining the U.S. Senate as a legal institution at Stanford Law School in California. And he spent a term lecturing on international studies at Lawrence University in Appleton.
In the small classroom setting, Feingold learned that the next generation of legal thinkers want a very different kind of world than the one they’re seeing. “It’s a generation that has a different attitude towards politics,” Feingold says. “Frankly, there is a deep skepticism about the two-party system, and yet they have this enormous interest in service.”
Feingold also called upon his experience on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee to pen While America Sleeps: A Wake-Up Call to the Post-9/11 World, a critique of the global war on terror.
In the summer of 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Feingold U.S. special representative for the Great Lakes region of Africa. Feingold was charged with stabilizing a region that in the last two decades has witnessed millions slaughtered, rampant government corruption and the rise of multiple rebel armies.
In the 20 months he served as a special envoy, Feingold visited central Africa 15 times to talk peace with various factions. Barely a year into his new gig, Kerry told a global audience that U.S. diplomatic efforts had helped end “an armed rebellion” in the Great Lakes region of Africa.
Feingold says he gained insight into how the United States is perceived around the world and how the nation can be a positive force towards resolving complicated geopolitical conflicts.
“It’s a big world with all kinds of interconnections,” he says. “If we only have tunnel vision...not only do we not understand the problem but we don’t look good to the rest of the world. We need to have a stronger foreign policy that reflects the complexity of the world today.”
Not long after Feingold was ousted from office, supporters began murmuring about his return.
In 2011, the fight over the Act 10 bill led to efforts to recall the governor. Early in the Capitol protests, handmade signs appeared with Feingold’s image and the phrase: “This is what a governor looks like.” As the protests evolved into a full-fledged recall campaign that fall, the signs were everywhere.
“I know a lot of people were angry at [Feingold] for not running,” says Julia Wells, who — on behalf of United Wisconsin — formally filed the paperwork to launch the recall against Walker. Wells was disappointed Feingold didn’t heed the calls, but understands. “Russ had prior commitments, big commitments,” she says. “I admire him for not walking away from that.”
“If he didn’t want to do it, he shouldn’t have done it,” agrees Matthews. “But I think we may well have had a different outcome if [Feingold] had run.”
Feingold says staying out of the recall was more personal than political. “After the election in 2010 my family said ‘can we not do this anymore?’” says Feingold, laughing. “It seemed to me that was a reasonable request.”
Feingold also wanted a break. “I needed to make sure that I could be a person who could contribute in other ways. I don’t want to be a guy who just runs for office.”
Nevertheless, his hiatus from electoral politics didn’t last long. In the summer of 2014 he decided he was ready for a rematch against Johnson.
“But it doesn’t matter if I wanted to do it,” he says. “The important thing is if people wanted me to do it.”
When Feingold began feeling out if there was interest in his return to the Senate, he found that people were longing for things to be turned around in Wisconsin.
“The last few years have been pretty brutal to the working people,” he says. “A lot of people’s hard work has been insulted by those that are running this state, and frankly a lot of those [politicians] in Washington. That’s not Wisconsin.”
Feingold leads in the polls. A Marquette University Law School Poll released Sept. 30 shows Feingold is up by 14 points. But Johnson has a slight edge over Feingold in the money race. Campaign filings show the senator with $2.7 million in the bank, Feingold at $2 million.
Unlike their race in 2010, Feingold and Johnson are competing in post-Citizens United America, which means special-interest groups can spend unlimited amounts of money on behalf of either candidate. Those special interests are gearing up.
USA Today reported in August that the national Club for Growth group has promised to spend at least $2.5 million attacking Feingold. Two environmental groups — the League of Conservation Voters and Environmental Defense Fund — have launched a $1.6 million ad campaign critical of Johnson’s environmental record. Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2010 that he does not believe “in the science of man-caused climate change” and that “it’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity or just something in the geologic eons of time.”
This kind of spending fuels polarization, Mayer says. “Democrats and Republicans seem to despise each other. It’s radically different than it was even a decade ago,” he says. “If candidates are interested in competing effectively, you have to adapt.”
McCabe, the former director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, compares the influx of campaign spending to an earthquake. “It radically altered the political reality,” he says. “Overall election spending in Wisconsin more than tripled after the Citizens United decision.”
But McCabe says 2016 shows that candidates with the most cash aren’t necessarily winning the hearts and minds of voters.
“It doesn’t seem to be doing Hillary Clinton a heck of a lot of good...she’s struggling while Bernie Sanders is surging,” says McCabe. “Walker took full advantage of Citizens United for his presidential run. How’d that work out?”
McCabe notes that the rise of Republican outsiders Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson demonstrates voters disdain for the status quo. “Somebody has got to start breaking the stranglehold of the political consulting industry,” McCabe says. “We [need] candidates willing to take strong stances on issues and really get voters thinking.”
Nevertheless, Feingold is changing his rules of engagement. In August, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would not stick to his pledge from previous campaigns to raise most of his money within Wisconsin. It was one of the five pledges he made famous in 1992 by posting them on his garage door in Middleton.
In the first few months of his current campaign, contributions to Feingold from out-of-state donors exceeded those given by Wisconsinites. The Johnson campaign pounced even though it raised almost an identical percentage of money from out of state. “Keeping your word to the voters is something people of all political persuasions should expect from their public servants,” says Reisinger.
Feingold argues that the standards he set for old campaigns have been made obsolete by Citizens United. He told the Journal Sentinel: “There is no hypocrisy or dishonesty when a certain set of facts that existed in 1992 simply do not exist anymore.”
He is still attempting to restrain the influence of money, inviting Johnson to sign the Badger Pledge, which discourages outside groups from airing attack ads.
The Johnson campaign won’t comment on the pledge. “Until he fully explains his hypocrisy and comes clean on how his own slush fund propped up his political ambition, there’s nothing else to talk about,” says Reisinger.
Johnson’s campaign also declines to comment on Citizens United. Feingold says that’s the real hypocrisy. “When you do go after...these enormous corporate powers that benefit from Citizens United,” says Feingold, “they squeal.”
Johnson’s efforts to paint Feingold as corrupt after many years in office mirrors a tactic Tammy Baldwin used to beat former Gov. Tommy Thompson for the U.S. Senate in 2012. Baldwin, who had been a congresswoman, rebranded Thompson as an out-of-touch influence peddler.
Unlike Thompson, Feingold didn’t make millions while out of office. But the Johnson campaign brands him a hypocrite on his signature issue, calling Progressives United, the political action committee founded by Feingold in 2011, “a dark money slush fund.”
Federal records show that since 2011, the PAC donated $352,008 of the $7.1 million it spent to candidates and political parties. About half the organization’s money went toward other expenses like staff salaries. “Sen. Feingold has become the very thing he used to despise,” says Reisinger.
Joe Fadness, executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, describes the PAC as a ruse to keep longtime staffers on the payroll. “It is the ultimate hypocrisy that Mr. Campaign Finance formed these bogus slush funds to serve as his personal ATM machine, taking millions from unsuspecting donors to pay himself and his friends to sit around before launching another desperate campaign,” he said in a release.
Feingold says that Progressives United did what any PAC does: built a database of supporters it can call on for votes, money and other support. It was a necessary step to fight the influence of Citizens United. “What [Progressives United] did was organize hundreds of thousands of people to effectively take on complicated issues that needed attention,” says Feingold.
The group worked on net neutrality and opposed banking deals awaiting approval by the federal regulators. Feingold says Progressives United’s other mission was to put like-minded allies in office.
“The organization was also very effective in raising $2 million indirectly...for progressive candidates,” Feingold says. “This is what the organization actually did, and frankly, it’s done a great job.”
In the 2016 cycle, the PAC has so far donated $10,000 to the Democratic parties in Florida and Ohio. Candidates who received direct donations from Progressives United include House members Pocan and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Progressives United has not yet made any direct contributions to Feingold’s Senate campaign.
But even if it does, Progressive United’s spending will likely be limited. Currently inactive, it has just $64,000 in its treasury.
While talking to voters on the campaign trail, Feingold hears stories about the bitter political divide in Wisconsin.
“A lot of Thanksgiving dinners haven’t gone well because of these political divisions,” he says. “That’s not the Wisconsin I know, that’s not the Wisconsin I grew up in. We have an obligation...to make the people of the state feel part of one community again. People are more than ready for that.”
Feingold has not reinstated the listening sessions he was famous for in office. But he did spend the summer touring the state, talking to people.
“We’re actually going directly to people in spontaneous situations,” says Feingold. “I’m trying to make it as unplanned as possible, and that’s where you get some of the best comments.”
Feingold hopes returning to public office will help heal some of the divisions created in the Walker era of Wisconsin politics.
“It’s time to turn it around,” said Feingold. “I believe I can help. Running a good campaign...I hope will not only be about whether or not I serve in the Senate, but about our plan to reunite this state in a positive way.”
Editor's note: This article was amended to note that Progressives United is now inactive.