"Manchester, N.H. - After hearing Russ Feingold on the radio Friday decrying big deficits and the Iraq war, one man phoning in to the show told him, "I think I'm listening to Howard Dean." That comparison popped up more than once during the Wisconsin senator's two-day trip to this state famous for its first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
But it seemed more apt in some respects than others.
If Feingold decides to run for president - "It's too early for me to make a judgment," he said here - he will be a political dark horse. He'll be an outspoken critic of the president's Iraq policy. And he'll depend heavily on discontented grass-roots Democrats and independents, mobilized partly by the Internet, to fuel his candidacy.
Those are the obvious Dean parallels.
Yet Feingold's short time in New Hampshire also suggested that his candidacy would be as idiosyncratic as his three-term Senate career, with a record and rhetoric that often resonate with his party's liberal base, but occasionally leave it cold. The featured speaker at a local party dinner Friday night aired on C-SPAN, Feingold was introduced by John Rauh, a longtime activist for political reform. Rauh singled out three Feingold votes for the crowd to ponder. One was the senator's opposition to the Iraq war. That drew hefty applause from the 130 or so Democrats at the event, billed as the "Eleanor Roosevelt Covered Dish Dinner." Then Rauh cited Feingold's vote last week for Bush nominee John Roberts as chief justice of the United States.
That drew silence.
"You may or may not agree with Russ," Rauh told the audience. "But I suggest that it indicates the deep sense of independence within his soul." Then Rauh mentioned that Feingold was the only senator to vote against the 2001 USA Patriot Act. The crowd gave Feingold, who was still waiting to speak, a standing ovation.
This was the senator's sixth out-of-state political trip of the year, after forays to Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and California. In New Hampshire, of course, visits from politicians with national ambitions have more obvious presidential overtones. "Why am I here?" Feingold asked at the outset of his speech Friday night in Epping. His listeners responded with a knowing laugh.
Feingold drew mostly warm and partly curious crowds of well over a hundred people at each of his two main events, the party dinner Friday and a "listening session" at Dartmouth College on Saturday morning. He also appeared with the mayor of Manchester, met privately with the Democratic governor, John Lynch, and sat down with a high-powered group of more than two dozen Democratic insiders, including party and labor leaders. That event was open to the press and filmed by state public television. Feingold also was interviewed Friday on local TV, and for his public radio appearance, he was introduced by New Hampshire host Laura Knoy as a blend of "prairie" populist, progressive reformer and "party maverick." The trip drew coverage from several of the state's newspapers, its main TV station in Manchester and a Web site on New Hampshire politics.
Though the 2008 election is three years away, other Democrats have also been paying their early respects to the Granite State's voters and media, from Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh to 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards. But this was Feingold's first trip of this kind to the state, and it offered an early glimpse of how he is putting himself forward as a national Democrat. As Dean did in his 2004 campaign, Feingold says Democrats in Washington are "too timid," especially in their unwillingness to talk about withdrawing troops from Iraq. Contending that the war is a "tragic" distraction from the fight against al-Qaida, the senator has proposed setting a target date for a full troop pullout by the end of 2006. Just as Dean did in 2004, Feingold says the party should draw sharp lines. "Republican lite," he said here, is "not going to work." And Feingold offered plenty of shots at President Bush and the GOP on his trip. He said the administration's performance was "miserable" on Iraq and the nation's finances.
"I think we can blow them away in 2006," he said of the GOP. But while Dean, now party chairman, built his following in the 2004 campaign with slashing rhetoric, Feingold is more low-key, and his "niche" in a Democratic race may have more to do with the specifics of his own distinctive voting record, including the long list of Bush and GOP initiatives he has opposed, sometimes in limited company. He liberally cited those votes at his appearances in New Hampshire: against the war, the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind education law, bankruptcy reform, the big energy bill that just passed. After the comparison to Dean was made by a former Dean supporter during Friday's public radio interview, Feingold offered this distinction.
"I actually voted against the war in Iraq. . . . I actually had to stand there and take that vote, and it wasn't easy after 9-11," said Feingold.
All in all, how did Feingold go over in New Hampshire?
Many Democrats in New Hampshire praised him for "courage" and "guts" on the Patriot Act and the war. He also got high points for the McCain-Feingold campaign law he co-authored, the issue he is most closely associated with outside Wisconsin.
But there were also mixed reactions to the blend of politics he was offering up on his visit, combining sharply liberal positions with some not-so-liberal ones (he told New Hampshire listeners he supports gun rights), and mixing appeals to conviction with calls for pragmatism and bipartisanship.
"He seems to be a maverick," said one Democrat attending the party dinner, retired professor Gary Patton. "He's one of those people you wonder how he does it, to be so unorthodox in an age when everybody is covering their derrières. He seems to get away with it."
Others, meanwhile, voiced sharp reservations about the Roberts vote.
Mary Heslin of Deerfield called Feingold "impressive," but said "if Roberts turns out to be the one who destroys our civil rights, then I'll be annoyed." Another Democrat at the dinner, Leah Caswell, thought that Feingold lacked the sweeping, "idealistic" Democratic vision she was looking for. "I think he was well-received here," she said. "I wasn't happy with him personally."
Caswell liked Feingold's opposition to the war but was bothered when Feingold coupled his criticism of Iraq policy with a vow to be tough on terrorism. "If there are people out there out to kill us, we should stop them first," Feingold told the crowd. Caswell thought he sounded "hawkish."
Feingold, who with the exception of Afghanistan has generally voted against the use of U.S. force, said in an interview with reporters Saturday that Democrats shouldn't cede national security issues to Republicans, and should make clear to voters they believe force is sometimes justified. "I think Democrats and progressives will bankrupt their credibility if they can't be very clear about those who attacked us on 9-11. There is no room for simply trying to 'understand' al-Qaida," said Feingold, who told his audience at Dartmouth, "I'm no pacifist. I'm somebody who believes if somebody is trying to kill me and my kids, we better stop them."
Feingold told reporters that the nation's "top priority" is to "destroy the terrorist networks."
Said Feingold: "If that sounds hawkish, so be it. My credentials for opposing unwise wars are pretty clean and clear."-from the story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
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