More Feingold

An article in the by Chris Lehmann in the New York Observer looks at Feingold's resolution.

A mild- mannered Midwestern Senator—Russ Feingold—announces on a Sunday-morning chat show that he’s going to introduce a resolution to censure the President. His grounds are straightforward: that the President’s warrantless-wiretapping initiative violates the law and the constitutional separation of powers. His party’s leaders, all universally understood as coastal-elite figures drunk on their hatred of the President and hell-bent on his undoing—well, they flee en masse, literally hiding behind each other as inquiring reporters try to suss out what they make of the proposal.

“Both Democratic politicians and pundits are afraid,” Mr. Feingold said on March 21 by phone. He was between constituent tours during the week’s Congressional recess. “Time and again, they allow themselves to be intimidated from taking a strong stand against the administration.”

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“One simple rule of politics is that the more ferociously you’re pushing your talking points, the less you believe in them. The Republicans jumping so hard on this tells you that they believe they’re in a really vulnerable position—that this issue is not the winner they thought it was.”

But Democratic Congressional leaders are treating the G.O.P.’s ability to dictate the terms of debate as a virtual law of nature. It is arguably the whole point of political leadership to make volatile forces swing in your direction, and harness them to a coherent stand. By contrast, Mr. Michael said, the reigning mentality among Democratic leaders is that “if we take a stand, we risk defeat. That’s a chicken-shit refusal to have a real debate …. The Democratic establishment and the press establishment won’t let that debate happen.”

Senator Feingold seems placidly determined to ignore all that. “Guess what? They’re out of touch,” he said. “That story is finally emerging, now that polls are showing popular support for a censure. It just shows that people in that town are only talking to each other. You can publish that. That’s on the record.”