Feingold, Again

You gotta watch this. It's like he crawled into my brain and figured out what I was thinking, then transformed the grey matter into sentences.

When Feingold surprised everyone with his call for censure the President was at 37% in the polls. The whole of Washington ran away from the proposal, saying the mere mention of it will cause Bush to rebound dramatically. Now the President's at 31% in the polls.

The guy understands that the nation is starving for leadership in a dangerous and confusng world, and that expressing our desire for sound policy, honest government, checks and balances, and accountability is the greatest political winner you can have at this time:

Now, you don’t hear this stand-up language here in this town. The consultants and the pundits and others will tell you these positions are “losers” — I’ve heard that literal language for this — and that it is dangerous to let there be any real light between our position and the White House’s position, or else you’ll get called soft on terrorism. You already hear people saying that the Michael Hayden nomination will be a great opportunity for the White House to show the Democrats are soft on terrorism. And you bet the pundits in this town will somehow suggest that this, too, just like my censure resolution, will cause the President’s numbers to shoot up. You remember that happening, right? It didn’t happen at all, but that’s what they’re gonna say, but it’s not right.

I take a different view, with a major qualification. My view is that we should appeal to basic American values in the post-9/11 era by saying we will stand up to this administration’s mistakes in strategy in the fight against terrorism, and that we will stand up this administration’s unnecessary assault on the rule of law in the guise of the fight against terrorism.

And he calls out exactly the people he needs to call out. I just finished the part in Kos and Jerome Arnstrong's book "Crashing the Gate" concerning Feingold's 1998 re-election campaign, where the Washington consultants ran ads in Wisconsin without Feingold's OK, where they openly dissed his media consultant and tried to foist their own on him. I get the feeling that this one's personal. Feingold went with his guys in '98, got outspent 3:1, and still won.

These consultants are destroying the party from within, and they are accountable to nobody. Bob Shrum's lost at least 7 Presidential elections and you can bet somebody will hire him in 2008. As long as there are Democrats, these guys have a job. It doesn't matter if they win or lose.

I'm desperate to break that cycle. But it's a long-haul effort.