Oct. 10, 2005 | WASHINGTON -- Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold has latched his political future to the third rail of American foreign policy. This summer, he proposed a date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq: Dec. 31, 2006. The date raises a specter that no one in Washington -- and especially no Democrat -- has been willing to broach: that the American people should begin to prepare for a political failure in Iraq, at least a failure by President Bush's standard of establishing, before the troops leave, a fully functional, democratic Iraqi state.
It is not the first time Feingold has gone out on a political limb. In September, he was the only Democratic senator with presidential ambitions to support John Roberts. He was the only senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act. Before that, he spent nearly a decade fighting the culture of political payola, a fight he won in 2002 with passage of the McCain-Feingold legislation.
Salon sat down with Feingold last week in his Capitol Hill office, which he has decorated with the trophies of his career as a populist politician. There was a photo of his garage door, where he wrote out a contract to voters in 1992 during his first statewide race. There were the framed roll-call votes from the final passage of his campaign-finance legislation. And there was the senator himself, dressed in pinstripes and a blue-gray tie, speaking with the urgency of a politician with his eyes on the White House in 2008. In a wide-ranging interview, he spoke about the "timidity and weakness" of his own party, the mistakes of Sen. John Kerry, the qualifications of Harriet Miers and his plan for winning the War on Terror.
If President Bush came to you this afternoon and said, "I've got trouble in Iraq. What should I do now?" what would you say to him?
"Well, Mr. President," I would say, "we need to get the focus back on those who attacked us on 9/11." I would say to him that I was proud of the way he and his administration conducted themselves after 9/11. I thought his speech to the Congress after 9/11 was one of the best speeches I've ever heard by a president. I admired not only the focus but the bipartisanship of his approach in the lead-up to Afghanistan. We had a historic unity in this country, and I was pleased to be a part of it.
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