White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said the large turnout (more than 26,000) at President Obama’s rally at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — featuring a last-minute appearance from Sen. Russ Feingold — “showed that we are beginning to make up the enthusiasm gap…Democrats are coming home.”

Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen, but certainly not everyone viewed the event as a political success. Kenneth R. Mayer, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Battle ‘10 that last week’s rally was marked by political weakness.

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“When a Democratic President has to come to Madison, Wisconsin in the heat of a campaign to fire up the base, that’s a bad sign,” Mayer said. “It’s like a Republican having to go to Dallas or Salt Lake City.”

The whole point of the rally was to inspire the heavily liberal, college-age crowd to turn out in November, as it did in considerable numbers for Obama in 2008. As it turns out, even the most left-leaning of supporters were not particularly enthused, as detailed in a recent piece at RealClearPolitics (emphasis added):

“Russ Feingold is one of our biggest progressive heroes in the Senate, and people know his record and know that he’s a straight shooter,” said Kaja Rebane, a 32-year-old environmental studies graduate student at the University of Wisconsin who volunteered for President Obama’s 2008 campaign. “But a lot of people still don’t realize that he’s in a lot of trouble because they haven’t been paying attention.”
Further down State Street at the 40th annual Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival, Jacob Weigandt echoed that sentiment.
“There is less enthusiasm,” Weigandt said. “All my friends who are voting are concerned.”

It’s a really bad sign for Democrats when this crowd starts complaining that Feingold’s speech was “rife with talking points” or that “Obama hasn’t accomplished what he said he would.”

A state GOP aide who helped with Sen. John McCain’s campaign in 2008 told Battle ‘10 that the current atmosphere couldn’t be more different than it was two years ago. “They (Democrats) were out in full force, signs everywhere, working 24/7, and we were having trouble getting people to come in on the weekends,” the aide said. “It’s a huge turnaround.”