Feingold vs. Obama.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Russ Feingold and President Barack Obama

Russ Feingold raised acmes when he criticized President Obama for hitting up big donors for money through a Super PAC the kind of fundraising the President himself once criticized.

"I think people will see it as phony that Democrats start playing by Republican rules," Feingold told Sam Stein of Huffington Post. "People will see us as weak and not being a true alternative and just being the same as the other guy. And as I have said before, to me this is dancing with the devil."

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Feingold is a "loser," progressive commentator Ed Schultz shot back on his radio show. Having lost his Senate seat in 2010, Feingold is now just a "heckler from the stands," Schultz added. "This is about winning. If you don't have the money, you can't win."

Plenty of other Democrats echo this refrain: It makes no sense to "unilaterally disarm."

"We're not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back," Jim Messina, the Obama reelection campaign manager, told The New York Times.

That's why the President is dispatching his campaign staff and advisers to raise money from big donors for Priorities USA Action, the Democratic Super PAC.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, outside groups are raising unlimited donations through the Super PACs this year, which spend them mainly on television attack ads. The President said in 2008 that he didn't want independent money spent by outside groups, and criticized the corrosive effect of all that unregulated money on politics.

But not this year. Messina warned donors "we may have no spending advantage (as we did in 2008) and could in fact get outspent."

Does getting outspent mean defeat?

Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks campaign cash, doesn't think so.

"Of course you can win while getting outspent," he says. "The most important thing is the quality of the candidate and how well that candidate connects with the voters."

In Feingold's home state of Wisconsin, a group of progressive activists are calling on whichever Democratic candidate emerges to run against Governor Scott Walker to eschew big money in the recall race. Walker has raised a record-breaking $12 million over the past year, racking up $4.5 million in just five weeks--mostly from a handful of big donors from outside the state, including $1 million from Bob Perry, who created Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gave us the term "swift-boating."

The distorting effect of all that money on democracy is huge. Obama himself...