The Feingold moment?

The New Republic has a profile (free registration req’d) of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis) that makes him look ever-more appealing (to me, anyway, though surely not to the editors of TNR).

Not only did Feingold vote against the authorization of force for the Iraq war (question to the Dems who are now complaining that they were duped: what did Feingold know that you didn’t?), and not only was he the sole senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act, but he has been a pretty consistent anti-interventionist, even during the Clinton presidency when many Democrats discovered their inner hawk:

Conditions in Iraq are certainly nasty. But Feingold has long harbored wariness about U.S. military action. When Republicans forced a 1995 Senate vote to cut off funding for U.S. military forces in Bosnia, for instance, he was the sole Democrat to join 21 conservatives in support of the resolution. As other Democrats waxed idealistic about human rights, Feingold fretted about Vietnam parallels and worried that “our attempting to police the world threatens our own national security.” By 1997, he was fighting to cut off funding for military operations in Bosnia and to begin an early withdrawal of U.S. forces. “What they haven’t done is define a concrete exit strategy for our American troops,” he said at the time. “This administration needs to sit down and work with Congress to map out a specific schedule for bringing our troops home, or they will be there for a very, very long time.” Likewise, Feingold cast just one of three Democratic ‘no’ votes against the 1999 Kosovo bombing campaign. “It’s a compelling notion that the American government has an obligation to stop brutality and genocide. I can’t dispute that,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in March of 1999. “But how can we be acting in Bosnia and Kosovo and not Rwanda, or Sudan, or East Timor, or even Tibet?” Feingold even told me that, during the 2000 presidential campaign, “I liked some of the things George W. Bush said about nation-building.”

The problem with Feingold is that he may not enough of a dogmatic liberal to win the primary (he was the sole Democrat to vote to see the Clinton impeachment trial through; he voted to confirm John Ashcroft as AG and John Roberts as chief justice; he has been a moderate on gun control) and probably not enough of a hawk to win the general election.

But if the Democrats were picking their candidate solely on the grounds of who would most appeal to me, an anti-war civil libertarian would be a pretty good place to start (they could also make him or her pro-life, but let’s not be utopian).