Russ Feingold’s latest FEC filing has some interesting news. As the National Journal reports:
Just over 43 percent of Feingold’s money came from Wisconsin donors. That’s not unusual in increasingly expensive Senate races. But it does fall short of Feingold’s long-held pledge to always raise a majority of his funds from Wisconsinites.
Yet again, Feingold attempts to paint himself as "the people’s candidate," but he’s trapped in his political ways, which is to be expected of someone who has spent 32 years of his life in politics. The article went on to report that 46 percent of Senator Ron Johnson’s amount raised came exclusively from Wisconsinites.
Feingold initially made the pledge in 1992 saying,
"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."
He even put the pledge on his garage:
The National Journal added that he kept the garage door pledge for his reelection bids, and he even introduced a bill in 1997 requiring 50 percent of campaign contributions to come from a candidate’s home state. Fast forward a few years, and it seems he’s forgotten his standards of campaigns past. 57 percent of the money he’s accepted has come from outside of Wisconsin, proving Feingold has changed.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also reported on Feingold’s broken promises, saying:
Feingold said Thursday that his in-state fundraising rule was not a pledge in perpetuity but a series of election-by-election commitments.
He is now trying to backtrack on his previous statements. He refuses to adhere to his original principles, but this isn’t the first time in his campaign he’s done that. In another act of campaign finance hypocrisy, it was revealed Feingold used his Progressives United PAC to create a slush fund to pay his and his staff’s salaries. You can see his PAC monetary break-down here:
Once the godfather of campaign finance reform, Russ Feingold has turned on his values and has turned on Wisconsin.