Two stories showed up on the internet today that I’d have rather not read, at least not at this particular historical moment, two days out from the close of an election cycle that’s easily the most dismal I’ve ever lived through. Both were stories about endings—one a eulogy, one an obituary—the former a wrap-up of Russ Feingold’s senate career, a career that will now doubtlessly end soon after the votes are counted on Tuesday, the latter news of the death of John Kennedy’s speechwriter, Ted Sorensen. He was 82.
Feingold was the Senate’s one and only actual maverick. Not this cheap approximation the press corps imagines a maverick to be, some guy who hounds and infuriates party leadership with calculated positions that shift with every change in the political winds, but rather the sort who leaves his whips red in the face because he never compromises on what he imagines his party to stand for.
For those of us still mourning the loss of Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone before the 2002 midterms, those of us so dismayed to be reminded in election season after election season that the only reason the Democrats have never lost for being too liberal is that they’ve never actually tried, Feingold has been our one reprieve, the guy who voted against impeachment proceedings and the Patriot Act, against the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia, the guy who championed the public option and holds the distinction today of being the only Democrat to hit the campaign trail this season and proudly remind his constituents of his vote for healthcare—and the guy who did all of this with such aplomb that he mainstreamed hardline ideological liberalism in a state as historically Repubican as Wisconsin.
But the strains of anti-incumbency in this year’s climate are just too strong for Feingold to weather, especially when he remains so committed to the pledge he made all the way back in 1992 to eschew any outside spending on his campaign.
Meanwhile, Sorensen was a different sort of link to the past, a reminder of a class of public servants who five decades later continues to loom like historical giants.
Sorensen was a major component of my personal political education, and it was the men with whom he surrounded himself—and the words of his they spoke—that first inspired me as a teenager to believe in the promise and possibility of government as a place, an idea, that could bring a people together and move a country forward.
And while Sorensen’s contemporaries have been mythologized by history as great men they were most certainly not that; they were merely good men. And when you consider the great men of history—Caesar, Alexandar, Napoleon, Robert Moses, et al—you realize the merely good is the best you can hope for in government, men who err but men you can have faith in, men who will surely disappoint you and men who will make wrong and sometimes devastating decisions, but men who at least you can trust to be approximating the good, to be attempting it and aspiring to it, and to be occasionally falling short only because they, like us, are human.
Taken together, the death of Sorensen and the defeat of Feingold seem to form a third panegyric, a sort of funereal homage to a lost time in American politics, a time before we’d all grown so disaffected and cynical that even if good men did seek to serve us we’d be too jaded to recognize it.
And even though this week, in this election, we seem to be just about as disaffected and cynical and jaded as we’ve ever been, the stories of these two should give us reason to remain hopeful, to remind ourselves that while all good men eventually pass, the ideals they stood for can most definitely enjoy a second act. It’s just up to us to set the stage.
