I saw Senator Russ Feingold at the UCLA School of Law yesterday. He gave a short speech and took questions from the audience. There was a good turn out-they moved the event from the small room they had originally booked to a larger one-and used the original room as an overflow room (I presume with a audio/video hookup). The majority of people in the audience were UCLA law students, and (in theory) the topic for the speech was Robert's confirmation.
I say in theory because a large portion of Feingold's speech was on Iraq and his recent announcement that he believes we should be out of Iraq by the end of 06. He said he felt that he had to break the "taboo" of setting a target date for the withdrawal, and dismissed claims that that would somehow help the terrorists or insurgenents. He attacked other Democrats (not by name) for supporting the war and not willing to attack Bush on it (he sounded like a lot of people here on this topic, frankly), even though support for the war in Iraq was collapsing, even in conservative counties of his home state. The audience was very friendly towards him and very anti-Bush and anti-war, so he threw out a lot of "red meat", and he got rounds of applause on several occasions.
He also talked about his vote against the PATRIOT Act, and on the SAFE Act, which repeals portions of the PATRIOT Act. He said it passed in the senate, but the house followed Bush (meaning little no changes), so now it had to be hashed out in committee. He didn't sound hopeful there.
He did speak about Roberts as well, mainly saying what we all know, that Roberts was intelligent, competent, and worrysome in his views, but that Feingold would wait to make up mind on his vote until after he questioned him during the hearings.
The last part of his speech was on campaign finance reform. He said that many of the activities of the 527's last year were illegal, and that the FEC was not doing it's job. He really tore into the FEC, and said he had introduced a bill to do away with it and replace it with a group of law experts who presumably would obey the law as written.
He then took questions from the audience. (I didn't take notes, so this is all from memory, including my memories of his speech.)
Many of the questions from the law students in the crowd were on Roberts. Feingold said he was worried about Roberts' pro-business rulings (and somebody brought up a ruling this that Feingold was unaware of, and I believe gave him a CD-ROM with info on it later on). Feingold used another example, in a ruling Roberts gave on manditory arbitration. Roberts said congress was always in favor of manditory arbitration, so the court should be too, in a ruling. Feingold said that was a lie, and that while he couldn't pass any laws preventing a company from using manditory arbitration against employees, he did write a law saying that car manufacturers couldn't force it on car dealers (because car dealers had better lobbying than mere employees (said snarkily)). To answer another question, he said he couldn't use Roberts' wife's anti-abortion activities against Roberts in deciding how to vote.
Another question was on health care. Feingold said he was in favor of a single payer system that covers everybody, leaving the exact details of such a system to each individual state.
On a campaign finance reform question, he said he has been trying to talk McCain into a public financing system similiar to what they had in McCain's home state, and mentioned Feingold used a similiar system during his first state senate run in Wisconsin-but the maximum spending limit in Wisconsin had never been raised for inflation, so the system was useless now.
All and all, it was a good (although fairly short) event. Feingold certainly sounded like he was running for president. He was quite forceful and blunt in his talk, and the audience responded positively (although it clearly was a friendly audience).