In Mom’s Kitchen With Russ Feingold
In, I think, 1991 I was back in New York, visiting mom. She introduced me to Russ Feingold, who was sitting at her kitchen counter. She said he was running for U.S. Senate and was in New York on a fundraising and lecture tour. My brother, a student at the U of Wisconsin, had volunteered for Feingold, who was then a state legislator there. Feingold was at our house because he really was on a shoestring while campaigning. By staying in our guest room he could save the money on a hotel.
He seemed like a nice guy, unimposing, but very firm in his convictions of the ways in which government could really change. I’d met and spoken to a number of Congressman and Senators as a reporter for Newsweek and other places, but never in such an informal way. After we talked, mom asked what I thought. “Not sure. Good ideas, but he seems too idealistic to really make it in the Senate,” was, approximately, my off-the-cuff assessment. Through some flukes of the year he was running, he got nominated with a plurality of votes because there were a lot of candidates. He then got elected.
In the Senate, he seemed to maintain his ideals, as the co-author of ground-breaking campaign finance legislation with “maverick” John McCain, as the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, and through other examples.
It’s a shame to see him voted out. I don’t know Wisconsin politics. He hinted after losing that he’ll run in 2012, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see him again holding high office, or at least influencing the political process. I look forward to seeing him run, and plotting his own measured if idealistic course. I don’t always agree with Feingold, but I’m glad I was wrong, that an idealist is able to make it in the highest reaches of U.S. politics. And if the occasion arises, I’d be happy to again have him stop by our kitchen counter and hear his latest ideals.
