Obama, Feingold, and Cooties

Russ! Russ Feingold! Come on out, come out, wherever you are!

No? Not gonna do it? What's wrong, Russ?

Obama is in Wisconsin today speaking at Milwaukee's Laborfest.

Feingold is campaigning in Wisconsin on Labor Day, too. But he's not going to be appearing with Obama. The president is coming to Feingold's home state and Feingold won't be there to bask in his glow and popularity.

That is very telling.

Patrick McIlheran has written an essay on RealClearPolitics "about Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold and his president, whom he flees."

McIlheran writes:

President Barack Obama's spending Labor Day afternoon in Milwaukee at an annual union festival. It's quite a party: Parade organizers were still looking for volunteers to help carry the giant protest puppets of the Earth Goddess and such. Pity, then, that Russ Feingold, the incumbent Democratic senator in a neck-and-neck race, can't hang out with the president.

But Obama and puppetry just aren't the right atmospherics these days, are they?

Feingold, three terms in office and now tied with a plastics manufacturer no one heard of five months ago, will be at Laborfest earlier in the day. By afternoon, he'll have scampered far from Obama, to a parade in his hometown, Janesville, where the General Motors bailout didn't save the truck plant and unemployment is now double-digit. A spokesman said Feingold asked the White House to change its schedule, but you know how these things go.

Ask yourself: If you were an embattled senator, famously progressive and customarily elected by students, unions, peaceniks and others who dig giant protest puppets, and your state was going to be visited by a president who two years ago drew swooning arena-sized crowds of just such voters, do you think you could rearrange your schedule to absorb his magic?

This is the measure of Obama's fall: Even senators who define the Democrats' leftward edge act like he's got cooties.

McIlheran nails it.

...A Democratic pol explained to me that Feingold is reluctant to appear near a president who is to his left. If true, this itself is rich. Feingold lately has been calling himself a penny-pincher because he opposed earmarks. He also voted for Obama's stimulus, for Obama's swollen budget, for Obamacare and against the president's jihad on the financial sector only because he didn't think it punitive enough. As Obama yanked the nation to the left, Feingold kept pace.

But -- again, if true -- it means a senator who in 2008 toyed with running for president as the Dems' unabashed progressive now finds Obama politically toxic.

Clearly, Feingold is having an identity crisis.