2005 was good year for Russ Feingold

Wisconsin's Sen. Russ Feingold had a very good 2005, as he emerged as a player on the national stage, according to a couple of pieces of year-end punditry.

Ron Brownstein's column in the LA Times says Hillary's obviously still the one to beat for the '08 nomination, but adds:

The most significant development in the Democratic presidential race this year was that one potential candidate to Clinton's left and one to her right each took a step past the others in their bracket.

On the left, the potential candidate who improved his situation the most was Wisconsin Sen. Russell D. Feingold. By all conventional measures, Feingold is a very dark horse. He's little-known nationally, he's Jewish and he's a senator, a combination that doesn't scream electoral viability. (The number of sitting senators elected president, two, doesn't much exceed the number of Jews, zero.)

Yet over the last year, Feingold has not only raised his visibility but done so by attaching himself to a specific agenda with a clear Democratic constituency. After voting against the war in Iraq in 2002, Feingold this year became the first Democratic senator to endorse a timeline for withdrawing all U.S. troops. And after casting the lone Senate vote against the Patriot Act in 2001, he helped lead the recent Senate filibuster that blocked the law's permanent renewal.

These high-profile positions are raising Feingold's stature in the same grass-roots and online liberal communities that propelled Howard Dean to the forefront of the 2004 Democratic race. Feingold is fanning the embers with an extensive Internet operation that has included stints blogging on popular liberal websites like Daily Kos. Considering where the potential candidates started, "Feingold has definitely come the farthest," said Joe Trippi, Dean's 2004 campaign manager.

The candidate on Clinton's right who made headway is Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, Brownstein writes. Chris Cillizza of the WashPost says that Warner had the best year, but Feingold is not far behind:

* Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold (D): When Feingold was the lone senator to oppose the Patriot Act in 2001, he was seen as a laughing stock by many political observers. No one was laughing earlier this month when Feingold led the opposition to reauthorizing the controversial law amid revelations that President Bush had authorized the wiretapping of U.S. citizens without court approval. Feingold's willingness to put himself out on a limb also paid dividends earlier this year when he became the first prominent Democratic politician to propose a timetable for American troops to withdraw from Iraq. Both of those positions endeared Feingold to the party's liberal left, which is looking for an heir to the grassroots movement built by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in 2004.