April 29, 2016

#FlashbackFriday To Feingold’s Feckless Flip Flopping

Former Senator Russ Feingold took a break from pretending to be just an average dude in a fleece driving around Wisconsin to road-test some fresh spin.

Having utterly failed to explain away his flip flop on his famous campaign finance pledge to raise a majority of money from in-state so far, he trotted out a new line at Thursday’s WisPolitics.com luncheon, as reported by Wisconsin Public Radio:

But, as it has every time Feingold has tried to justify his turnabout, his past words come back to haunt him, like his initial promise that his pledge was “for the future”:

“It’s not just self-serving, because I’m promising it for the future. I’m saying that’s a pledge that I’m going to keep,” Feingold said then. “I’m not going to get in there and say, OK, where are the PACs and where are the out-of-state contributions? I’m making a pledge for the future.”

Feingold still thought his pledge had a “relationship to reality” in 2010, when he made it the center of his reelection campaign:

As PolitiFact pointed out when they rated Feingold’s bait-and-switch a “full flop”:

The more-than-half-from-Wisconsin pledge is not a 1992 campaign relic. Feingold followed it in his re-election bids in 1998, 2004 and in 2010.

It appears that Feingold’s definition of “reality” depends on whether he’s won or lost his last run for office.