Kevin Binversie writes about Senator for Life Russ Feingold:

What a difference six years makes.

Facing defeat squarely in the eye in 2010, Russ Feingold and “progressive” commentators did all they could to stave off political oblivion. One of the most curious, was embracing a narrative that the “Middleton Maverick” was as “Tea Party” as they come.

The most famous of these came from Ruth Conniff of “Progressive” magazine , who in August 2010, wrote:

Pro-gun, anti-bank, and a staunch defender of civil liberties, Russ Feingold should appeal to the Tea Party crowd.

Here’s a quick political quiz:

Which candidate running for U.S. Senate this year just released a radio ad attacking his opponent for being insufficiently vigilant about citizens’ Second Amendment rights?

Hint: This candidate frequently invokes the Constitution, and has taken lone-wolf positions opposing government wiretapping and other forms of Big Brother-like over-reaching. This candidate also opposed the Obama Administration’s recently passed financial reform legislation, saying it did doesn’t end “too big to fail” and won’t stop more bailouts of the banks.

Rand Paul?

Sharron Angle?

Nope. Make that Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.

Feingold and his campaign would continue this narrative all the way through the debates*. At the Wisconsin Broadcasters’ Association debate , Feingold boasted that he knew the Constitution better than Ron Johnson.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) used his first debate against self-funding Republican nominee Ron Johnson Friday night to extend an olive branch to the tea party movement that’s poised to rattle races across the midterm map.

Feingold, who is trailing Johnson by single digits in most public polls, first took a swipe at his GOP opponent for being a latecomer to embracing one of the tea party’s most cherished symbols: the U.S. Constitution.

[…]

“Even though he made some comments originally about how the Patriot Act maybe had some problems, he fell in line to the Republican view, says he’s for the Patriot Act,” Feingold said, pointing out that he was the only senator to vote against the post-Sept. 11 legislation. “And the tea party people agree with me.”

“Tea party people know that I stood against the Wall Street scam from Day One, that I voted against TARP, that I voted against repealing Glass-Steagall Act that kept these guys under some control,” he said, referring to the 1930s law that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

You can see the exchange for yourself here.

Fast-forward to the 2016 rematch between Johnson and Feingold, and things have changed. Much like his garage door pledge and insistence on liberal third party groups staying out of his race, Feingold’s apparent “love” for the Tea Party has gone overboard.

While in Green Bay, Feingold told a reporter for Gannett Wisconsin network he’s changed his tune, and sees them as a “mistake.”

“I think the Tea Party was a mistake,” he said of a recent wave of Republican lawmakers who won seats, including the Senate seat Feingold lost in 2010. “I think it’s going to turn around. I don’t think people like this whole obstructionist attitude.”

Why the sudden change of heart by Feingold?

Because he doesn’t need votes from so-called “Tea Partiers” anymore. With public polling in his favor and the public’s perception of the Tea Party much lower than it was in 2010, Feingold feels he can finally be honest about the Tea Party’s agenda. He also isn’t holding back about how he truly feels about things like Obamacare, getting the national debt under control, and other tenants of the Tea Party.

Among some in the Wisconsin Tea Party, it has become vogue to say Sen. Ron Johnson has “sold out” during his time in office. Honest people can have some disagreement over that belief, but Feingold’s statement confirms something that’s long been known – he tried to con them in 2010 and is showing that his return to the U.S. Senate would ensure he will grow government, grow debt, and rubberstamp a President Hillary Clinton.

There’s no mistake in that reasoning.

Feingold’s phoniness shows in his attempt at defining the tea party as merely obstructing Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats, instead of its original purpose to reduce the size and role of the federal government. Feingold also shows as much respect for the Second Amendment as Comrade Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

Feingold went around earlier this week claiming he was for the middle class because he supports keeping the home mortgage interest deduction. (Which certainly benefits the big banks, which purchase mortgages from smaller banks, doesn’t it?) But M.D. Kittle points out that Feingold’s tax record is not what he’s telling you:

In Wisconsin, taxes, spending and the $19.2 trillion national debt will be key issues in the closely watched contest between conservative U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Oshkosh, and liberal Russ Feingold, D-Middleton, the long-time former senator who Johnson beat in 2010.

As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it on Sunday, “Johnson and his Republican allies are expected to harp on Feingold’s record as a U.S. senator.”

There’s a reason for that.

As Johnson and his allies like to point out, Feingold supported more than 270 tax increases during his 18-year tenure in the Senate.

The justification for his tax-and-spend record, Feingold and his allies like to point out, is in part the former senator’s focus on combating the ever-growing national debt.

“The top of my agenda is the federal deficit, making sure that as we go forward to try to get the country moving again from an economic point of view that we don’t forget that part of that has to be a serious plan to reduce the federal deficit over the next four or five years,” then Sen.-elect Feingold said during a Nov. 9, 1992 press conference in Washington, D.C.

How’d that work out?

Well, U.S. debt climbed $10 trillion during Feingold’s tenure in the Senate.

The debt clocked in at $4.2 trillion when he arrived in January 1993, and stood at $14 trillion when he left in January 2011.

Debt has gotten no relief during Johnson’s first term in office, rising about $5 trillion over that time. But Johnson backers say at least the senator has attempted to rein in runaway spending and check soaring Obama administration spending plans.

Feingold on four separate occasions voted against a resolution proposing a balanced budget constitutional amendment. Most Democrats did in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Johnson co-sponsored a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, as well as legislation demanding dollar-for-dollar spending reductions when a president asks for an increase in the debt ceiling.

The Republican-led “Cut, Cap and Balance” bill, which Johnson supported in 2011 and Democrats almost universally hated, identified more than $1 trillion in potential savings from wasteful government programs.

“This mountain of debt and the irresponsible spending that worsens it every year now threaten the hopes and dreams of future generations. This is immoral. We must stop,” Johnson notes in an issue statement on the debt and deficit.

Feingold and his supporters have billed the liberal as some kind of progressive fiscal hawk. He did, at times, draw a line in the sand on debt-raising proposals. In 2003, Feingold authored an amendment reducing by $100 million President George W. Bush’s $726 billion, 10-year tax cut.

“We are in a war, and the budget must reflect it,” Feingold said, referring to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Feingold seemed to have a hard time saying yes to spending cuts and no to spending.

During President Barack Obama’s first years in office, Feingold was constantly ready with an affirmative vote for a litany of spending plans. He said yes to an additional $825 billion for the economic recovery package, massive spending that Feingold argued was critical in saving the U.S. economy from ruin. He was arguably one of the deciding votes for Obamacare, pegged to cost taxpayers about $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

And over his time in the Senate, Feingold supported hundreds of millions of dollars in increases for Medicaid and other social welfare programs.

“Senator Feingold hasn’t met a tax he didn’t want to raise, and he has a long record of choosing to raise taxes on hardworking Wisconsin families, rather than make the tough choices to keep government fiscally responsible,” said Pat Garrett spokesman for theRepublican Party of Wisconsin. …

In his first year alone, Feingold voted at least 25 times in support of higher taxes, according to a review of Congressional Quarterly vote tallies.

Feingold voted to kill an amendment to eliminate instructions to the Finance Committee for a $32 billion tax increase over five years on Social Security beneficiaries. The revenue increase was created by hiking from 50 percent to 85 percent the amount of benefits subject to tax for single recipients with incomes of more than $25,000 and couples with more than $32,000.  The amendment would have cut new spending by the same amount in order to meet the same deficit-reduction targets in the resolution.

A further review of the Congressional Quarterly records found that the senator also that year voted against exempting small businesses or family farms from increased taxes on income that is reinvested in the business. The costs would have been offset by cutting discretionary spending. Feingold backed a 1994 budget reconciliation bill that raised $241 billion in revenue through tax hikes.

In 2001, Feingold voted at least 30 times to raise taxes, including voting against the adoption of a concurrent resolution to implement a 10-year budget plan calling for $1.8 trillion in tax cuts over the period, according to CQ.

Again, Feingold argued in part that such tax cuts would only expand the deficit, even as he voted for spending increases that did just that.

Two years later, the senator voted for tax increases 41 times, the review found.

Between 2007 and 2008, Feingold supported hiking taxes at least 45 times, including voting against an amendment to provide an employee payroll tax holiday over a six-month period. That time, the senator went against Obama, who traded Congress a two-year extension on the Bush-era tax cuts for the payroll tax holiday.

“Senator Feingold spent 18 years in Washington supporting big government over Wisconsin families and small businesses, and his hundreds of votes in favor of higher taxes prove it,” said Brian Reisinger, Johnson campaign spokesman. “Wisconsinites fired Senator Feingold in 2010 because he voted for policies that raised taxes and grew the government instead of growing the economy.”