In early April of 2010, Michelle Litjens, the chairwoman of the Winnebago County Republican party, found a local guy who was thinking of running for the U.S. Senate. She brought him to a meeting of a handful of conservative operatives in Madison. A plastics manufacturer, he’d never been involved in politics. He didn’t even know he was supposed to speak at the meeting, and had to patch together a few talking points in the car on the way down.

After Litjens introduced the candidate to the group, people rolled their eyes and checked their watches as he awkwardly ambled through his reasons for running. There were already other, more seasoned people thinking about seeking the GOP nomination, including former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson. Just who did this guy think he was?

Thompson chose not to run, however, and that plastics manufacturer, Ron Johnson, won the GOP nomination. News of his candidacy remained in the spotlight for about ten minutes before Wisconsin residents returned to the state’s new all-encompassing pastime, hating Brett Favre’s guts — because against this newcomer, sitting Democratic senator Russ Feingold seemed bulletproof. Elected every six years since 1992, Feingold had cultivated a reputation as a “maverick” willing to break ranks with his party on fiscal issues. He aimed to be the pluripotent senator — able to adapt to whatever political environment confronted him at the time. However, his recent votes for the controversial health-care overhaul and the expensive and ineffective “stimulus” bill had weakened him substantially.

It fell to deputy campaign manager Jack Jablonski to prepare Ron Johnson for the rigors of campaign question-and-answer sessions. The early days of Johnson’s campaign were beset by verbal stumbles and misstatements, such as when Johnson suggested he was running for office because he had heard Dick Morris say that some rich guy should take Feingold on.

Hiding Ron Johnson’s lack of articulacy quickly became the central focus of the campaign, with which I was embedded for six months. “Ron is prone to mistakes,” one staffer told me, explaining why they were keeping him away from the media for the time being.

As a result, campaign manager Juston Johnson (no relation to the senator) and communications director Kristin Ruesch began an “issues boot camp” for the new candidate. They locked Johnson in a room for three days in mid-June and fired questions at him: What do you think caused the financial crash? Is Obama a Marxist? Are you the tea-party candidate? These became known as the “murder sessions.”

Both Jablonski and Juston knew that Johnson was a smart guy. “He’d sit and study policy papers all day if he could,” Juston told me. “But he’s also very impatient and sensitive to his own vulnerabilities. He can’t stand just saying ‘I don’t know’ when asked a tough question. It’s our job to teach him that sometimes it’s okay to give a 10- to 15-second answer, then pivot to jobs and the economy.”

Despite Johnson’s willingness to learn, these behind-the-scenes question-and-answer sessions often got testy. At times, Johnson’s obduracy ground the meetings to a halt. He didn’t think he’d be asked many of the questions his staff posed him. They often had to go back over issues several times.

The third week in July, Johnson began a tour of the western half of Wisconsin. His public appearances in places such as Hudson, River Falls, and La Crosse were limited primarily to Tea Party events or ones similar to them. When speaking in front of these groups, Johnson often got too comfortable with his message. For instance, while he dodged a bullet by denying he wanted to drill for oil in Lake Michigan (an early Feingold accusation), he soldiered on with his message that BP shouldn’t be vilified. This caused much consternation among his staff, who pleaded with him to stay away from anything but the most basic talking points on the BP issue. “I will not stop defending the producers of America,” he shot back.

To the Tea Party groups, Johnson’s free-market rhetoric was golden. He strongly expressed his belief in the power of free markets to pull Wisconsin out of the recession.

His campaign staffers didn’t necessarily disagree with that philosophy. But they had a campaign to win. And as long as the man-made hole in the Gulf of Mexico continued to spew oil, it was an open wound to Americans.