The Feingold Loss.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Senator Russ Feingold - Editorial

November 2 was a brutal night. I was stuck in a local TV studio watching my Senator, Russ Feingold, go down in a crushing defeat to Ron Johnson, a wealthy plastics manufacturer with no political experience, a guy who believes global warming is "lunacy."

The old rules of politics no longer apply.

You can win every debate, as Feingold did.

You can get practically every newspaper endorsement in the state, as Feingold did, including some very conservative ones.

You can be a loyal and dutiful servant of your constituents, coming home every weekend and visiting every county every year, as Feingold did.

And you can still lose.

I didn't agree with Feingold on everything. He was too much of a deficit hawk for me. And his reflexive defense of Israeli government policies was at odds with his otherwise stellar human rights record.

But he was a fantastic Senator.

You won't find a smarter, more diligent, more independent, more courageous person in that chamber.

He was the only Senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act, and his speech opposing it could have come right out of Fighting Bob La Follette's mouth.

Said Feingold: "There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch the terrorists.... But that wouldn't be a country in which we would want to live, and it wouldn't be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that country wouldn't be America."

He was the only Democratic Senator to vote against the financial reform law because he said, rightly, that it didn't do enough to prevent another banking crisis.

He led the fight against destructive trade deals like NAFTA. He opposed the Iraq War.

He voted against the deregulation of Wall Street and the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

He fought for media reform.

He railed against the evil of corporate power that is poisoning not only our...