In this land of beer, brats, and the Packers, it is the autumn of discontent. Anger, distrust, apprehension, disaffection—these are some threads I pulled out of my recent man-on-the-street chats in Wisconsin. People were eager to talk politics, and the subject of their Democratic senator came up. Russ Feingold is winning no popularity contest, at least in my unscientific sample of his constituents. But the polls are showing the same. Politico reported that Feingold is falling behind his opponent businessman Ron Johnson by the “double digits.”

You could also tell by the signs sprouting in people’s front yards. From Door County in the north to the Milwaukee suburbs in the south, the signage seemed to favor Republican candidates. Voters I talked to craved a sense of honesty they think their politicians lack, a sentiment I picked up in other visits to the Midwest this year. Perhaps they believe Republicans will deliver for them in this department. Or perhaps they won’t vote at all, like Russ Jones, age thirty, who was waiting with his young son for sausage pizza at Little Caesars in Waukesha. “I don’t bother with politics. I don’t follow it,” he said. “They just lie. They don’t do what they say they’re going to do when they get elected.” Jones has never voted.

At a model railroad store in Green Bay, I ran into sixty-two year old Russell Mueller, who was working behind the counter. Never would he support Feingold. He was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, Mueller explained. But that wasn’t his only beef. “I don’t think that he’s honest. He considers himself smarter than us. He’s for big government. I don’t like his view of America. It’s definitely not mine.” Mueller added that “this Ron Johnson is liked locally.” He said he had been to a Tea Party rally and liked it because “we’ve always thought this way.” “It gives us a voice,” he said. “It’s like talk radio. It gives us a voice too. “

The day I talked to Mueller, Politico ran a piece about the Tea Partiers and talked to one Sal Russo, whose consulting firm in Sacramento runs the Tea Party Express. “When people ask me what’s the measure of success at the end of the day, my answer is ‘We’ve already achieved it,’” he said. “‘We’ve made fiscal responsibility an important part of everyone’s plank.” That has come through loud and clear to the Wisconsinites I saw. Another customer, Charlie Koskela, age seventy-one, joined the conversation and confirmed Russo’s observation.

Although Koskela is a Republican, he voted for former Wisconsin Democratic senator William Proxmire every time he was up for reelection. Proxmire was responsible for much of the tough consumer credit regulation passed in the 1970s, and was known for giving his Golden Fleece Award for wasteful spending in government. “He was a person who was going to do the people’s business, and he did,” Koskela told me. But why is Democrat Feingold different, I wanted to know. “He’s too liberal and doesn’t want to keep the spending down. We’ve got into lots of government spending,” he said, placing blame on Feingold and his Democratic colleagues.

Koskela was particularly troubled by the credit crunch, and how the Obama team has handled it. “The banks got tied up with home mortgage interests, and that froze the financial system,” he said. What the country needed, he explained, was a “depression that deprived the wealthy of their money, property, and high-paying jobs.” He went on: “We needed a depression to cure that, but instead they borrowed for the future to solve the economic depression and as a result bankers made hundreds of millions of dollars.” He believed that the government should have let a depression happen. “It would have re-set the wealth distribution in this country.”

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