FOR U.S. SENATE LEINGOLD The Foreseen Rise Of Russ Feingold Wisconsin's New Senator Knew His Offbeat Campaign Would Work-Just - Ask Him By Michael Abramowitz Washington Post Staff Writer MIDDLETON, Wis. t was November 1986, and although Russ Fein- gold had just been reelected to the Wisconsin State Senate by a comfortable margin, he wasn't satisfied. As he partied with supporters, his attention was drawn to an image on the television: Bob Kasten, who'd just won his own reelection to the U.S. Senate. For a Wisconsin "progressive" like Feingold, Kas- ten was something akin to the Devil himself, or at least the state's version of Ronald Reagan. After all, Kasten had retired one of the state's liberal icons, Sen. Gaylord Nelson, in the landslide of 1980. But for Feingold, more than politics was at stake here. Just weeks after the '80 election, his father, Leon Feingold, had died of cancer. A small-town lawyer who had been among the most prominent progressive Democrats in southern Wisconsin- pals with the likes of Nelson and Tom Fairchild, who once ran for the U.S. Senate against Joe Mc- Carthy-Leon Feingold had been depressed and bitter, his family said, over the results of the last election he would ever see. Now his son, still only 33 and a junior state legis- lator, was beginning to entertain thoughts of aveng- ing that loss. Russ Feingold looked up at the TV set and pointed at Kasten. And he told his friends: "I want him." Six years later and two weeks out from having fulfilled that audacious promise, Russ Feingold is lounging in the back seat of a dusty blue-and-gray Ford van, oblivious to the passing landscape of em- erald dairy pastures and golden corn fields of cen- tral Wisconsin. The flecks of gray in his closely cropped black hair are about the only signs of age on a face that would not seem grossly out of place in a college yearbook. He speaks with the casual self-confidence of the high school debate champion he used to be, for the most part folksy-but with a surprising amount of anti-politician rhetoric, even bile, for someone raised in a political family, educat- ed at such Establishment institutions as Harvard and Oxford (where he was a Rhodes scholar) and clearly gifted in political maneuver.