#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:
.@russfeingold says only taking money from Wisconsin donors would be "rule that has no relationship to reality." #WISEN
— Laurel White (@lkwhite) April 28, 2016
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.