When Bill Bradley and John McCain shook hands last December in Claremont, N.H., agreeing to shun "soft money," another pioneer in campaign finance reform cheered them from afar -- Sen. Russell D. Feingold.

Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, is linked with McCain as the author of the campaign finance bill that has yet to become law. Their proposal would ban the unlimited and unregulated donations to political parties that they think corrupts the political process, known as soft money.

Following a storied Wisconsin tradition, Feingold dedicates himself to reforming government. Not only does he try to root-out wasteful government spending and overhaul the nation's campaign laws; but unlike many, he lives by what he preaches. In fact, he almost lost his re-election bid by adhering to self-imposed campaign finance rules; and his office is so thrifty, he usually returns money to the U.S. Treasury. But the same zeal and independence he harnesses for good government, sometimes stirs the enmity of his peers and casts him as a maverick in Washington.

"Personally, he's not a go along and get along type of guy," said Sarah Binder, a government affairs fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "But being a prickly individual is not that unusual in the Senate these days."

Eschewing "Soft Money"

In the 1998 election, Feingold faced a more daunting proposition than the Bradley-McCain agreement: While the two presidential candidates agreed to forego soft money only if both were nominated, Feingold lived by his pledge unilaterally; the Republican Party flooded his state with money for his opponent.

"I believe the party soft money is the greatest single corrupting influence in our political process& The same people collecting the (soft money) checks are the same people deciding what bills to put on the floor (for a vote)," Feingold said recently.

Feingold led his Republican opponent by as much as 20 percent in the summer of 1998. But after a barrage of Republican-sponsored ads, Feingold found himself behind in polls weeks before the November election. "It was not an easy road, but it was well worth it," said Feingold, who ultimately won by only 2 percent.

After introducing a comprehensive campaign finance overhaul bill with McCain in 1995, Feingold worked five years for its passage. In the Bradley-McCain agreement, Feingold saw the fruits of his labor. "They are taking this issue out to the broader media in a way that can't be done just from the Senate floor," Feingold said in a recent interview.

Young Reformer

An affable man and a demanding boss, Feingold doesn't stand out in physical appearance except, perhaps, for his relative youth; he's 46. While some senators stroll around with an air about them, the former Rhodes scholar seems more down-to-earth, though at times intense.

He has worked all but three years of his professional life as either senator or state senator. In what is sometimes referred to as the Millionaire's Club, Feingold is one of the Senate's poorest members with a net worth of roughly $50,000 or less.

It is said that every person enters the Senate thinking he or she, too, could one day be president, but unlike a number of his colleagues, Feingold does not talk about it openly.

But it might not be a stretch to say it enters his mind. Wisconsin's junior Democratic senator knew he wanted to enter politics in the second grade, after he came home crying because he was the only one in his class who favored John F. Kennedy for president. However, that might demonstrate as much about Feingold as it does the conservative Janesville, where he grew up.

A strong family upbringing provided a sense of ethics from an early age. At 14 years-old, he spent a week manning a booth at the very conservative and very white Rock County 4H Fair devoted essentially to issues of both discrimination in housing and Martin Luther King, Jr.

He has stayed close to his roots, too. The only significant time he spent away from Wisconsin was after he graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and then Harvard Law School.

And when the Senate is in session, Feingold spends every weekend in his home state. He lives in a mid-sized family home, with a mortgage under $100,000, with his wife, two teenage daughters from his first marriage and two stepsons.

The McCain-Feingold bill

When Feingold and McCain first introduced their legislation -- what has come to be known as the McCain- Feingold bill -- their proposal was sweeping. Not only did they propose eliminating all unlimited, unregulated donations to federal parties -- so-called "soft money" -- but their original initiative also offered free television broadcast time for candidates, discounted postage rates for those who agreed to limit spending and other measures to try to limit the impact of outside interests.

In both the House and Senate, the bill initially failed. But since 1995, in an effort to gain broader support, McCain and Feingold pared down the bill to basically a ban on soft money. Their efforts have proven successful, with a majority of the House and Senate favoring the legislation last year.

The House passed the measure in 1999. Senate supporters, however, fell five votes short of the 60 needed to break a Republican-led filibuster that effectively killed the bill for the year. Significantly, of the four major candidates in the presidential race, George W. Bush is the only one who would likely veto such a measure if it did pass.

Although the bill was much less comprehensive than the one he proposed in 1995, it would have been the most significant change in campaign laws since the post-Watergate overhauls. "I'm trying to build a house here of campaign finance reform and I would describe the soft money ban as its foundation," Feingold said.

Republican opponents and a cadre of interest groups argue that the soft money donations are a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. But a Supreme Court ruling last month buoyed Feingold's optimism on passing campaign finance reform. The Court ruled that limits on campaign contributions to a candidate were legal.

Waste Warrior

While Feingold spends much of his time on parochial matters of concern to his constituents -- such as his fierce fighting against dairy pricing controls, which would hurt milk-rich Wisconsin -- rooting out government waste remains a top priority. Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog, rates Feingold higher than all other current Democratic senators over a career, except for one - the senior senator from Wisconsin, Herb Kohl.

Feingold also makes a concerted effort to skim waste from his office, and return as much appropriated money as he can back to the U.S. Treasury. For example, during the six-month period ending September 30, 1999, his office was allocated $1.787 million and did not spend $145,400 -- more than a large majority of offices.

Several people who have interviewed with Feingold's office or are familiar with it, say he tends to pay less than other offices. "They made it clear to me that I would be on the low end of the Senate (payscale)," said one former Democratic Senate staffer who interviewed there for a legislative correspondent's job. "It was not going to be competitive with what people around me made (in other offices)."

He takes his good government efforts to an extreme found in few other congressional offices -- to dispel the mere appearance of impropriety. His staff is not allowed to attend any non-government functions, such as with lobbyist groups or foreign dignitaries, without paying for it from their own pockets.

Playing the Maverick

But his maverick ways sometimes frustrates, or outright angers, members of his own party. Many Democrats were appalled by two votes during President Clinton's impeachment trial when Feingold voted against dismissing the case and in favor of allowing witnesses.

"He was the only Democrat to break and vote with Republicans," said David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "That ticked off a lot of Democrats in the state and in the Senate& It definitely solidified that he votes his own mind."

With the Wisconsin populace, the role of maverick plays extremely well. Despite his narrow re-election, polls taken last October showed more than a 3-to-1 ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings of Feingold's job performance.