On a more personal level, he also is back in his congressional district in the southeast corner of Wisconsin this week for town-hall meetings, armed with a PowerPoint presentation to buttress his arguments to his many working-class constituents.

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Speaking to a standing-room-only lecture hall lined with dozens of students and faculty members, he spent the last minutes of his presentation reading off the names of students, post-doctoral fellows, collaborating groups and funding sources from a projected slide that listed even more of them.

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