A Tale of Three Senators, The People and Special interests

 

I'm a student of American politics and it has always sparked a great pleasure in me it probably doesn't for the vast majority of people. Perhaps it's because I have such a wide view of it, I have a basic understanding that at its core, all the struggles that both sides  put forth as the most important issues of our time are just the latest version of a conflict that will never go away and in a free society, shouldn't.

Many might become cynical over that. I find it  comforting. When you take a very long view and see that we're still fighting some of the same issues we were in 1926 that we are in 2026, it makes you realize this too shall pass and it makes the urgency and stress will  ease just a bit.

One of the issues that is always going to be at the forefront of elections is that corporations, billionaires, the wealthy, or what we'll call the special interests have taken away the rights from the voters. All politicians of both parties have been corrupted by this and it is our necessity to get them out of office post haste. Such is the case in this election cycle and everyone in the 21^st century, particularly when it comes to the left but really both parties are guilty of it.

So I'm now going to relate two anecdotes given by two different Senators. One of them is a Republican who served in the Senate during the first two decades of the 20^th century and who I'm certain nobody has heard of. The other involves a Democratic senator who was at his time one of the most well-known examples of liberalism and will be familiar to some of you. And at their core both anecdotes tell the same story. Once I've done that I'm going to tie it to a third who clearly didn't hold with either one's teaching and paid the price.

First the Republican. Boies Penrose was what was considered a Political boss in the state of Pennsylvania back when corruption was far more out in the open then it is today.  He was elected to the Senate in 1896 and was reelected four more times, serving until he died on New Year's Eve 1921. He would be the longest serving Senator of that state until Arlen Specter surpassed his record in 2005. (So some things in politics do change.)

He was openly  conservative in a America where both parties were more conservative then liberal, being against reform of railroads, coal and most importantly oil companies. He backed conservative Republicans such as Taft and Harding for President. And in an era of cynicism he was forthright in his flaws. He actually boasted of his love of prostitutes because he didn't believe in the hypocrisy of his married counterparts who claimed not to frequent them

Indeed his forthrightness about his corruption almost makes him admirable. And it's that I want to talk about. Once asked about his political positions he would say:

I am often asked who I work for. The people or the special interests. To this I will always say: the special interests. They remember. The people forget.

That's the kind of straight talk that we always ask from our elected officials but almost never get. And I have to say it impresses me that Penrose was willing to say in print what so many elected officials must have wanted to but never did. I suspect Penrose said these words decades before Churchill would say that the biggest argument against democracy is five minutes with the average voter and both men were arguing that if elected officials had to rely on the voters to keep them in power they'd never be able to hold on to it for long.

Now the liberal Democrat: Hubert Humphrey. If you're a long-time reader of this column or know anything about American history you know that Humphrey was for twenty years was considered the gold standard for the liberal cause in America, for better and for worse. I'd like to tell you a story that a friend of his told the first time he won reelection to the Senate.

Humphrey ran for reelection in 1954 during Eisenhower's first term.  At this point in American politics there were fewer wave elections in Congress or the Senate and it was true in 1954. Humphrey had manage to get elected to the Senate in 1948 but at the time Minnesota was still a relatively conservative state and no Democrat had ever won reelection. So Humphrey had to do a lot of work in order to manage what was effectively a landslide over the Republican winning by fourteen points.

Now a friend went to see him within a month of his election. Humphrey chatted with him for less then two minutes before an aide came in and told him he needed to take an urgent meeting with someone back home. His friend was somewhat irked. Hubert said: "I have to do this to make sure I'm reelected." "But you just won reelection," his friend wailed. "I know," Hubert said "and I'm off and running again."

Penrose in his cynical way and Humphrey in a more charming way were both saying the same thing about the voters: you have to keep them on your side because they have an incredibly short memory. This was just as true in an era before cable news and the internet – hell before most Americans had a television in their homes – as it was in an era before air travel and air-conditioning, two factors that Howard Baker would later argue were critical for changing the way Congress acted forever.

And I need to be very clear it has always been trickier to do this if you were a liberal then a conservative because just as 80 years ago as today, the special interests had no more respect for them then they do now.  That was true for Humphrey. Six years later he was facing a tough reelection battle in the Senate and he spent much of 1959 decided if he was going to run for President. That campaign collapsed to JFK in May and he then had to spend the next six months trying to save his seat. He managed to do it, by the way – this time by a bigger margin over the Republican – but it was a harder battle then the margin looks and he had to spend a lot of time making sure the people of Minnesota knew that Humphrey had their interests at heart.

This was true of many liberals of Humphrey's era particularly in many Midwest states and western states. It was certainly true of Frank Church in Idaho, Birch Bayh in Indiana, George McGovern of South Dakota and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. As the conservative revolution began in the 1960s and into the 1970s it was increasingly hard for these very liberal Senators to keep winning reelection. They were doing immense good for America but as time went on the voters of their states increasingly forgot what they did and they would end up going to right, perhaps as much because of their own short memories as well as the help of the special interests.

Now those of you who want to blame their eventual defeats on corporations will have a difficult time doing so: during the 1970s and early 1980s when most of these Democrats lost reelection Buckley v. Valeo was in full force and campaign finance laws were at their height for both parties. And that actually brings me to that third Senator who some of you might remember with fondness.

Russ Feingold was elected to the Senate in 1992 from Wisconsin. Feingold may have been the most liberal Senator in Congress during his tenure, frequently going to the left of his own party. He was a major opponent of NAFTA and free trade agreements and was one of only nine Senators to vote against creating the Department of Homeland Security. He voted against his own President multiple times, most notably voting against Timothy Geitner to be Secretary of the Treasury. And he was also one of two Democrats to vote against the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, saying it didn't go far enough.

He is best known for his work with John McCain for passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as McCain Feingold. It took seven years to pass because of immense opposition from both parties.

(I should mention that despite being in favor of imposing spending caps in the past, he refrained from doing so on himself during his 2004 run for reelection. He would frequently assert during that run that he was being outspent by his opponents in every election which would eventually be ranked as 'pants on fire' by Politifact.com.)

The 2010 election witness the birth of the Tea Party and while the results in the Senate weren't quite as devastating as in the House the Republicans did win six Senate seats. In 2008 Obama had carried Wisconsin by more than 10 points.

Feingold would run on his record. He ran on his independence, on his belief in campaign finance (by this point the Citizen United decision had come into effect) and where as most Democrats were running away from their votes for Obamacare, Feingold was proud of it.

His opponent was Ron Johnson, a Tea Party movement favorite who was also a millionaire manufacturer who couldn't have more been endorsed by the special interests. And in November Johnson won by nearly five percent over Feingold.

Feingold had done everything he could for the people of America and the special interests remembered that. And the people of Wisconsin sent a message. To drive the message home in 2015 Feingold ran against Johnson to try and regain his Senate seat. He was backed by every liberal organization in the country and by May of 2016 Bernie Sanders  - who was by this point the heir to the positions Feingold had battled for – endorsed him and fundraised for him. Most polls in fact showed Feingold leading in that state and considering Johnson's problems in the senate, most Republicans thought he was vulnerable.

It didn't matter. Johnson won by roughly the same margin he had in 2010 and actually ran nearly 75,000 votes ahead of Trump in his landmark upset victory. Feingold actually got 2000 votes less then Hilary did in that state. Regardless of what might have happened in the Presidential election the voters couldn't have made it more clear. The people of Wisconsin had completely forgotten of all the good things Feingold had done for them and they were fine with Ron Johnson.

Feingold, very much like Bernie Sanders, spent his career railing against the evils of the special interest that had corrupted America. And while he had that right to do so he forgot that specific lesson that Boies Penrose had said a nearly in a century before. The special interests remember and the people forget.

What lessons do I as a historian take from this?

First of all the special interests will never disappear from America. Whether they own plantations in the antebellum south, control big steel or big oil during the Gilded Age, control car companies or Hollywood, all the way to the tech billionaires that the left currently gnashes its teeth over, you will never be able to rid America of the special interests. Penrose was aware of that fact at the start of the twentieth century; I'm uncertain whether AOC and Bernie are aware of it today.

They can be restrained – slightly – with legislation or executive action but that will at best hamper them only temporarily. That's the feature of being wealthy, not a bug.  In a democracy you can never destroy one part of the American experiment completely, it only shifts to another position. That is naturally with the forward movement of this country.

Those who try to do so are noble and should be approved of for their efforts. I admire the work of Humphrey and his fellow liberals in the 1950s and 1960s for the fights they did today. But throughout their careers they also knew that their ability to do so was only dependent on the voters of their states. The special interests could raise opponents to beat them, so they had to constantly go back to the people and fight for power to keep doing it. They understood this was a battle that never ended but just shifted. The special interests do have an advantage but if you can mobilize the people you have the power to stop them.

And as Russ Feingold found out the hard way there is always a cost to going against the special interests at the expense of the system and your own party. Fighting the system is noble but you have the system on your side to hold power. And the special interests have a long memory while the people forget very quickly and are far less liberal then men like he and Bernie tend to believe they are.  Feingold misjudged the mood of the voters of Wisconsin both in 2010 and 2016 and both the Senate – and arguably America – are weaker for it.

You can't beat the special interests forever and while I'm not saying you necessarily have to join them, you have to accept they are always going to be there and they will never forget their enemies. Which means you better be doing everything in your power to keep the people on your side. They are quick to forget so those who hold office have to keep reminding them, not just for their own good and the good of the country but because that's how the system has worked and always will.

Try not to forget that.