Feingold (center) says the health care law is 'going to look pretty damn good in two years.' Russ Feingold's last stand

JANESVILLE, Wis. — Russ Feingold has spent 18 years on the fringes of the Senate Democratic Caucus and one very hard year here in his home state, running the opposite of this year’s standard-issue Democratic campaign.

But Feingold appears on the brink of going down in a national tide that’s blind to distinction. Infuriatingly to the Wisconsin Democrat, he’s been painted not as a leftist — the usual attack against him — but as, of all things, a Washington insider. He’s been forced to defend a claim to independence that he feels is self-evident – “A guy did his doctorate at Princeton on this,” he says indignantly – against an opponent who likes to ask, what kind of a maverick would vote for this year’s health care overhaul?


The irony is biting: While other Democrats ran away from health care, Feingold ran toward it and rallied a progressive base that adores him. But no matter, he’s still losing, down in every public poll and struggling in pretty much the same way embattled Democrats around the country are — as symbols of the status quo and of the unpopular health care legislation. And while Feingold was dragged to the table on health care — he was the last holdout on the public option — he gets some of his loudest applause when he brags that he’s the “only senator in the Senate” who will say that he’s “proud of my vote.”

Feingold calls public opposition to health care legislation the result of “an intentional effort to destroy the Obama presidency,” and he’s convinced it can’t last. The law is “going to look pretty damn good in two years,” Feingold told a sympathetic roundtable of a dozen women Friday morning.

“Some of us have to be the infantrymen on the front line, so that’s my fate,” he said.

Among the senatorial qualities Feingold lacks is any sense of being larger than life. He’s a life-size man of no special warmth — he’s long had a reputation as a bit of a humorless scold in Washington circles — and he slipped without friction out of a gathering in Janesville, his hometown, of retired autoworkers at the UAW’s Walter Reuther Memorial Hall. (“Only union-built vehicles assembled in the USA or Canada are allowed to park on premises.”)

“It’s obvious what the hacks that work for these people do,” Feingold said bitterly of the waves of attack ads aired by his opponent, Ron Johnson, in an interview at the union hall. “You hold a focus group, and you find out what are the qualities that people like in a person, and then you lie.”

Feingold is more accustomed to talking about process than most politicians, and the unlimited funds spent by Johnson and the outside groups supporting him are a major theme on the stump. One of his signature achievements was McCain-Feingold, which has been largely dismantled by the U.S. Supreme Court, but he is sticking to a pledge not to take outside money. He wrote the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee again this year asking that it not intervene on his behalf and told POLITICO that he would “absolutely” rather lose than see outside groups airing ads on his behalf. (He has taken fundraising and organizing help from MoveOn.org and from unions, of which he’s been a staunch ally.)

Feingold, at every stop, quotes Johnson’s having called health care reform “the greatest affront to personal freedom in my lifetime.”

“He must have led a charmed life,” Feingold jokes. “How does it hurt him that our youngsters can stay on their parents' insurance? And how does it hurt him that our seniors are finally going to get some help on that doughnut hole.”

The Wisconsin Senate race has been, by national standards, remarkably clean. It’s been fought on issues and on voting records, not personal issues, between two squeaky-clean men of the same generation. Feingold is the inheritor of the old left, opposing the Patriot Act and not just the war in Iraq but the conflicts in Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia as well.

Johnson, by contrast, hails from the other generational pole. He took the advice, so to speak, of the family friend in “The Graduate”: He went into plastics and made a fortune in the industry. He presses upon all comers slightly goofy, three-dimensional-looking plastic cards with his countenance, printed at the plant his company owns in Oshkosh. Johnson has been lumped in national caricature with sometimes intemperate tea party standard-bearers, but he’s not a professional ideologue in the manner of Rand Paul or Sharron Angle. He has lost newspaper endorsements over a tactical decision to refuse to articulate policy plans, keeping the race a referendum on Feingold. But when he strayed into an Oshkosh McDonald's Friday morning, there was no anger, and no mention of the Democrat.

“I hope you win!” a bubbly young nurse tells him, and he gives her a card.

Johnson, though appealingly direct in manner, campaigns only at the most abstract level. “Sen. Feingold wants more government,” he says. “I believe freedom and free markets are the solution to most of our problems.”

Central to his case in this anti-establishment year, though, is that Feingold is a fake maverick, not a real one.

“It’s never been a necessary vote. It’s when his party didn’t need him,” Johnson said. “He’s cultivated the image of moderation, but when his party needed him he was the 60th vote.”

Johnson declined to say whether he would break with the Republican Party more often than Feingold had broken with his party.

Johnson believes he’s run “a very decent, honorable campaign,” but the sneering tone of his ubiquitous television and radio ads is a stark contrast with his low-key persona.

The ads begin with Feingold hoarsely yelling, “A guy named Russ Feingold was the No. 1 maverick and independent in the entire United States Senate."

“Not really,” says the announcer. “Feingold went along with all of the other mavericks for the government takeover of health care. He fell in line along with all of the other mavericks voting for the failed stimulus. And he was really mavericky when it came time to increase the debt limit.”

Feingold has a stack of newspaper and academic studies that show that he casts the least predictable votes in the Senate. (A typical one, reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, found that his votes have been the most “atypical” of any senator of the past three Congresses.) He has also, contrary to Johnson’s claim, bucked his party on hard votes: Most recently, he infuriated the White House this year with his opposition to the financial regulatory overhaul, for instance.

“I’m used to being turned down by Russ Feingold,” said Dick Durbin, the Senate Democratic whip. “You just know better” than to work him for votes, he said.

Feingold finds the claim that his vote for health care reform compromises his maverick credentials hard to comprehend.

“It isn’t [being] a maverick to vote against things you think are good,” he told POLITICO. “What Mr. Johnson wants me to do is vote Republican all the time.”