Feingold: A New Democratic Party
By Sanford D. Horwitt
Simon & Schuster, 287 pages, $26
Along with registering your domain name, forming a PAC and suddenly and very publicly rediscovering your love for the Old Time Values That Make This Country Great, one of the earliest signs that someone is running for president can be found in bookstores, in the form of the campaign bio. Usually puff pieces designed to introduce the electorate (well, at least the portion of the electorate that reads) to the candidate, they’re almost always the same: overview of why the candidate is so great, followed by many chapters of story recounting the climb from humble beginnings, leading through setbacks that brought new wisdom to the moment, now, when the candidate clearly has earned your vote.
Now comes “Feingold,” Sanford Horwitt’s biography of the junior U.S. senator from Wisconsin, which has the misfortune of being a campaign bio of a man who, actually, isn’t running for president. As such, it feels a little lost. Although Horwitt takes care to stress that this is not an authorized biography, the Feingold folks can’t be unhappy with the result, a book in which the senator’s only flaws, apparently, are that he cares too much.
Horwitt is clearly a fan, and as such he doesn’t dig deeply enough to give the reader a good sense of who Russell Feingold really is. There’s a lot about the great things Feingold has done, but little critical assessment of how things have turned out. For instance, we learn that Feingold is troubled by the corrupting influences of money in politics, but nothing, from either Feingold or others, on whether the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law has solved the problem.
“Feingold” starts strong, opening with the famous scene (first reported by the Associated Press in 2002) of Hillary Clinton telling Feingold he’s ” ‘not living in the real world’ ” because of his quest to reform campaign-finance laws that, Clinton feels, will put the Democrats at a severe fundraising disadvantage. It’s a good bit, and it sets up the major theme of the book: Feingold is the straight-shooting alternative to all those career politicians who have become the tools of corporate interests.
And though some critical distance from his subject would be nice, the thing is, Horwitt by any measure is not wrong to admire Feingold. He’s clearly an impressive senator: co-sponsor of the most significant piece of campaign-finance reform legislation of the past 30 years; early, outspoken critic of the Iraq war; the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. No matter what you think of his political leanings, you have to admire his courage.
Still, a little critical perspective would be nice. Even in a book so clearly positioned as a campaign piece (and one that early on contains the line, “Feingold’s story is important because he represents the kind of courageous leadership that is so urgently needed in these troubling times”), at least some sort of outside context is badly needed.
What we get instead is a bit of a story without a country: not comprehensive enough to let opposing viewpoints paint a real picture of the candidate, and yet not insidery enough to let the reader come away with an intimate understanding of Feingold. Though Horwitt conducted multiple interviews with the senator over the past five years, the material is broad but not very deep and contains little on Feingold’s family life. We learn, almost in passing, of Feingold’s two divorces but get little about the reasons behind them.
The surprise is that “Feingold” has some pretty good moments. Horwitt talks to seemingly half the population of Feingold’s hometown of Janesville, Wis., and creates a vivid portrait of what it was like to grow up, as Hillary Clinton might say, “in the middle of America in the middle of the last century.” The early parts of the book are best, when we really do see the forces that shaped Feingold at work.
Still, one leaves “Feingold’ with much the same feeling one gets after watching a White House press conference: You had a great time, you learned some things, and yet the one thing you really wanted to know somehow never got answered. In this case, though the question is simple — “Why isn’t Feingold running for president?” — the answer is likely complex, and Horwitt sheds little light on it. Here’s his explanation:
“Back in Washington, an old political friend sat down with Feingold one day and gave him a little advice. He liked and admired Russ, but he told him that if he happened to catch fire in the early caucus and primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, that ‘they’re going to stop you.’ By ‘they’ he meant the Washington Democratic establishment, which didn’t appreciate Feingold’s independent thinking and passionate commitment to progressive politics. Feingold laughed and said, well, if he won Iowa and New Hampshire, ‘it would be a hell of a couple weeks.’ And by the fall of 2006, many of Feingold’s good friends assumed he was going to take the plunge and make his candidacy official after the midterm elections. He had to become better known beyond a core group of Democrats, civil libertarians and other activists. And there was a question of how much money he could raise. Although he’d start as a dark horse, people who knew him best thought that if anybody could figure out how to win, Russ Feingold could.
“But on the Saturday after the 2006 midterm elections, Feingold surprised and disappointed a lot of friends and fans when he said he was not going to be a candidate. He didn’t come right out and say it, but he had discovered that he didn’t have the burning desire to run this time.”
This bit illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of Horwitt’s account. He clearly has access to Feingold and his friends and supporters (though who is this “old political friend?”), but has little of a critical opposing viewpoint. This isn’t much of an issue in the early parts of the book, where we’re learning all sorts of things about what made Feingold Feingold, but it would help in our understanding of the man if we were given more than simply “he had concluded that he couldn’t win.” Why not? What changed his mind? Who are these shadowy members of the “Democratic establishment” who are standing ready to scuttle Feingold’s campaign, and how, exactly, would they be able to do it?
Ultimately, it’s unanswered questions like these that sink the book. Feingold, rightly, has a reputation for rigorously examining all sides of an issue. Too bad “Feingold” doesn’t do the same.
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Mark Coatney is a freelance writer.
