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Sen. Jeff Merkley smiles at a press conference as the Senate nears passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill he shepherded through the chamber. He's flanked by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Jeff Merkley didn't enter the U.S. Senate with the celebrity of Al Franken or the grass-roots fervor of Elizabeth Warren.

But as he prepares for his first re-election race next year, the Oregon Democrat has gained an unlikely nationwide following among progressive activists for leading crusades against big Wall Street banks, filibuster-happy Republicans and other targets.

"Our members know who he is and see him as a real leader," says Anna Galland, executive director of Moveon.org. "He is a thoughtful progressive voice on almost all of the issues. I can't think of one he is bad on."

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is just one of many left-leaning activist groups, environmental lobbies and labor unions Merkley has courted. Their support could prove crucial for the freshman senator, who remains much less well-known – and less popular – in Oregon than his colleague, Sen. Ron Wyden.

At the same time, Merkley's close ties to the Democratic left feeds the narrative pitched by his Republican challengers, who portray him as out of touch with most Oregon voters.

"His priorities and voting record seem to be out on the radical left wing of the political spectrum," says Rep. Jason Conger, R-Bend, one of five Republicans running for the seat. He dismisses many of Merkley's efforts – like taking on the filibuster – to wonkish pursuits that folks who work to make a living don't care about.

On the surface, Merkley seems one of the last senators you'd expect to attract an activist following. He's soft-spoken and often hunches over, as if he's trying to make his 6-foot-3 frame less obtrusive. Once an analyst for the Congressional Budget Office, he calls himself a "policy person" and often illustrates his points by drawing complicated charts. At one recent breakfast meeting, he grabbed a paper plate spotted with bagel crumbs to sketch out a graphic describing a new flood insurance law.

He admits he's less than a fiery speaker and doesn't share the charisma that's made consumer advocate Warren a frequently mentioned candidate for president in 2016.

But when he gets rolling in conversation, Merkley will show a certain relish in the list of antagonists he's poked in five years in the Senate: "I've upset big oil, big coal, big Pharma, big agriculture."

Sen. Jeff Merkley

Age:

57

Family

: Wife Mary and two teenage children

Elected to U.S. Senate:

Beat incumbent Gordon Smith, a Republican, in 2008

Re-election bid:

Running for a second term in the November 2014 election. Five Republicans are seeking the GOP nomination to challenge him: Portland neurosurgeon Monica Wehby, Bend state Rep. Jason Conger, former Linn County Republican Party chair Jo Rae Perkins, Portland attorney Tim Crawley and Mark Callahan, a Salem information technology consultant.

Merkley is firmly in the camp of populist Democrats who think their own party's leaders haven't been tough enough in taking on the financial establishment. The senator played a lead role in pushing legislation forcing major banks to give up their proprietary trading operations – which Merkley saw as letting them place risky bets with depositors' money. And he was a crucial force in deep-sixing the nomination of former Treasurer Larry Summers, whom critics saw as too accommodating to Wall Street, to head the Federal Reserve.

"The core place I come from is that ordinary people need a champion," Merkley says. "The very affluent powerful companies, they can exercise power in a number of ways. And I don't see a purpose of being in office to simply join that chorus."

It's been Merkley's quiet doggedness that has brought him the respect of Democratic peers and grass-roots groups.

"A lot of times when you are on bills, you work things out with staff members," says Fred Sainz, a vice president at the Human Rights Campaign. But Merkley sat at the negotiating table hammering out the terms of a gay rights bill he sponsored that passed the Senate this month, he says.

Merkley describes passage of the bill – which would ban workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity – as one of his major accomplishments, although it may well die in the House.

On his office wall, he keeps a prominently framed copy of a letter from a dying Sen. Edward Kennedy turning over leadership of the issue, a memento he cherishes of the passing of the torch from the Senate's most prominent liberal.

Merkley also makes himself a big presence on the activist circuit. More than almost any other member of Congress, he uses the Moveon.org website to propose petition campaigns to the group's 8 million members. His most popular: Urging support for his attempt to repeal a law that allows Monsanto to skirt a federal court order blocking the sale of some of its genetically modified seeds. That one's garnered 80,000 signatures.

In June, he was a keynote speaker at the annual Netroots Nation conference, where he talked about the "big issues we face as a progressive community." Essentially, he argued, the big problem is that the country is increasingly run "by and for the powerful."

While critics in Oregon may belittle his fight against the filibuster, the issue helped cement the allegiance of the grassroots.

Becky Bond, political director of the activist group Credo, says activists were enamored by Merkley's willingness to "buck the leadership of his own party" and fight to change Senate rules that allowed a minority of 41 senators to block anything of significance from passing.

Along with fellow freshman Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., Merkley began talking up filibuster reform shortly after he entered the Senate. But rather than just lobby his colleagues, he made the rounds of outside groups, arguing that the Senate's Republican minority shouldn't be allowed to so easily block the progressive reforms they prize.

"He gets the value of an inside-outside partnership -- of really using pressure from around the country to get Washington, D.C., to pay attention," says Adam Green, who heads the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

In part because of Merkley's influence, more than 70 groups formed the "Fix the Senate Now" coalition under the leadership of the Communications Workers of America to push for scaling back the filibuster.

But Merkley's outside organizing landed him in hot water with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other senior members of the Democratic caucus last January.

They complained that Merkley – in a conference call with activists –disclosed what individual senators said privately about the issue. Merkley denies breaking any confidences and says he soon patched up his differences with Reid.

In the end, the tussle only endeared Merkley to activist allies who had been chafing at what they saw as timidity among Senate Democratic leaders on a variety of issues.

Green even sent a fundraising email to his members that he says generated about $45,000 for Merkley's re-election campaign.

This kind of grass-roots fundraising has become a big deal for Merkley. He's raised a whopping $1.8 million through ActBlue, a fundraising website used by activist Democrats to tap small donors. Only three other senators have raised more through the website.

Merkley's fundraising often leans heavily on populist appeals. He invited small contributors to donate in exchange for being entered in a lottery for an expense-paid trip to D.C. to have lunch with him and Warren.

Another fundraising letter trumpets The New Republic's profile of Merkley, in which he was described as a "Liberal Lion." It should be noted, however, that the email didn't mention the full headline, which described him as a "Liberal Lion With No Roar," which refers to how hard it is to get anything done in the Senate.

That doesn't mean Merkley is bypassing D.C. insiders. In the last nine months, he's raised $447,000 from a long list of political action committees, including labor unions, agricultural interests and several Northwest-heavy corporations.



He also knows when to jump to the political middle. After the wave of health insurance cancellations caused a political furor, Merkley on Wednesday signed onto a bill by Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana – another Democrat up for re-election next year – that would allow consumers to keep any policy they have now.

Republicans chided Merkley for taking so long to recognize the law's flaws and for acknowledging he hadn't foreseen the wave of cancellations. "Either he didn't understand the law or he was passing on misinformation," says Monica Wehby, the Portland neurosurgeon who's among Republicans hoping to challenge Merkley.

Merkley, 57, insists he understands average folks quite well, having grown up in a blue-collar family in east Multnomah County. When he's not in D.C., he and his wife, Mary Sorteberg, and two teenage children live in the same east Portland ranch home they bought in 1994. It was not too many years ago, he says, that his wife, a nurse, drove a used Subaru so old it sometimes stalled going uphill.

What distinguished Merkley from many of his working-class friends was his ambition and willingness to go for the long shot.

He worked his way into blue-chip educations at Stanford and Princeton universities and launched into a career as a nuclear policy analyst for the Pentagon and the Congressional Budget Office.

Merkley left that career track to return to Oregon in 1991, where he says that after a difficult job search he went to work for Habitat for Humanity and then the World Affairs Council. In 1998 he was elected to the Oregon House.

In 2003, he gambled again, jumping into politics full time while his wife picked up most of the financial load. He became House Democratic leader, led his party's takeover of the House in 2007 and was elected speaker.

After Congressmen Earl Blumenauer and Peter DeFazio passed up opportunities that year to run against then-Sen. Gordon Smith, Merkley entered the race after winning the support of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

"The fact that I ended up in that campaign was a real shock to me," Merkley says. He went on to narrowly beat Steve Novick in the Democratic primary, and then ousted Smith in large part by riding the coattails of Obama's landslide victory in Oregon. His cautious, by-the-numbers campaign didn't draw much national attention.

But that changed after he hit the Senate and, from his new perch on the banking committee, began hammering at Wall Street. He also earned activist cred by pushing for a quick withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

"His votes and rhetoric tend to be left of center," says Tim Carpenter, national director of the Progressive Democrats of America. "When he was running, people didn't expect him to be quite as progressive as he turned out to be."

Merkley smiles when he thinks about the unusual course of his political career.

"I'm absolutely a risk-taker," he says, "and it kind of catches people off guard."

-- Jeff Mapes