Russ Feingold, a partner across the aisle, remembers John McCain.
McCain was ‘the go-to guy if you wanted to see if anything different could happen’ legislatively
Russ Feingold remembers John McCain as dogged, fun and unpredictable.
“There was this feeling that anything could happen with him, but in a good way,” Feingold said in a recent interview about the Republican senator from Arizona, who died Saturday while battling brain cancer.
Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who served in the U.S. Senate from 1993 to 2011, was McCain’s junior partner in their long, improbable but ultimately successful quest to pass major curbs in the way money was raised and spent in federal elections.
“That’s why he was such a great senator,” said Feingold. “Because (things) could go in any possible direction. It wasn’t locked in. That meant no matter what the subject was, people would say. ‘What about McCain?’ He was like the go-to guy if you wanted to see if anything could happen” legislatively.
To Feingold, that unpredictability was a signature McCain virtue in a world where members of Congress were becoming increasingly captive to their partisan roles and camps.
“(His) urge to get things done overrode partisanship in a way that I think many Americans are missing,” Feingold said in an interview before McCain’s death.
McCain’s brand of bipartisanship represented a “combination of principle, fun and good politics,” said Feingold. “It’s not really that way anymore.”
The odd couple of McCain and Feingold spent years trying to pass a big campaign reform bill, which was the signature legislative achievement of both men.
“He was just completely dogged. We always had the ‘defeat’ press conference at end of the session,” marking another year when the measure failed to pass.
“We’d go, ‘We’re still going to win this thing.’ You guys would laugh,” Feingold said of the press corps.
Curbing the use of money in campaigns was fiercely debated then and now, as both a constitutional and political matter. The McCain-Feingold law, enacted in 2002, was largely upheld at first by the U.S. Supreme Court. Then it was rolled back when the makeup of the high court changed. One key component — ending unlimited donations to the parties — is still intact.
But aside from the ongoing debate over its pros and cons, it was a very unusual and challenging bit of legislating. It took forever. The bill changed shape as it acquired new sponsors. It relied on entirely different parliamentary tactics
to get through each chamber of Congress. And even though it was a measure that had much more support among Democrats than Republicans, it was somehow enacted under GOP control of the U.S. House, a Republican president (George W. Bush) and a conservative Supreme Court.
“You couldn’t deter him,” Feingold said of McCain. “It was kind of a dream come true in terms of legislating.”
Feingold said he enjoyed working with McCain on other issues as well. An anti-war Democrat, he was grateful to the far more hawkish McCain for including him on foreign trips despite their dramatic policy differences. McCain would jokingly introduce Feingold to foreign dignitaries as a member of the Communist Party. On one Iraq trip, Feingold said he made his case for withdrawal, prompting another Republican on the trip to ask McCain, “Why did you bring this guy?”
“Well, I brought Russ along because Russ is consistent — consistently wrong!” McCain said, according to Feingold. “It just broke the ice. It set the tone for the whole trip — (that) Feingold is here to give the other side.”
Feingold said McCain “could be a real hothead,” but said the two had only one serious confrontation during the long quest to pass the McCain-Feingold bill. Some of his fondest memories are of McCain bounding across the Senate floor from the Republican side and asking, “Boy, what are we going to do next?”
Said Feingold: “There was this sense of electric activity, of being constantly in motion, always wanting to do the next thing, to move the ball forward.”
Feingold supported Barack Obama, naturally, when McCain was the GOP nominee for president in 2008. But “I think he would have been a very good president,” he said of McCain in the interview.
“He was open to looking at things in different ways,” said Feingold. “He was just a free spirit.”