smCOLUMN EIGHTY, DECEMBER 1, 2002
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COLUMN
EIGHTY, DECEMBER 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
COYOTE WONDERS: WAS IT MURDER?
[The following was posted on Peter Coyote's website, http://pcoyote.blogspot.com/
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REMEMBERING SENATOR WELLSTONE (2)
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Paul Wellstone, 58, Icon of Liberalism in Senate, Dies
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 12:35:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
October
26, 2002
Paul
Wellstone, 58, Icon of Liberalism in Senate, Dies
By
DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
WASHINGTON,
Oct. 25 " Paul Wellstone often seemed out of step. He called himself a liberal
when many used that word as a slur. He voted against the Persian Gulf war in his
first year in the Senate, and this month opposed using force against Iraq.
Senator
Wellstone, 58, who died in a plane crash today while campaigning for
re-election, fought for bills favored by unions and advocates of family farmers
and the poor, and against those favored by banks, agribusiness and large
corporations.
This
year he was the principal opponent of legislation supported by large majorities
of Democrats and Republicans that would make it more difficult for people to
declare bankruptcy. He argued that the measure would enrich creditors at the
expense of people "in brutal economic circumstances." He advocated
causes like national health insurance that even many of his fellow liberals
abandoned as futile.
Mr.
Wellstone was a rumpled, unfailingly modest man who, unlike many of his
colleagues, lived on his Senate salary. He was married to the former Sheila Ison
for 39 years, having married at 19 when he was in college. His wife and their
33-year-old daughter, Marcia, also died today in the crash.
When
Mr. Wellstone arrived in the Senate in 1991, he was a firebrand who thought
little of breaking the Senate tradition of comity and personally attacking his
colleagues. He told an interviewer soon after he was elected that Senator Jesse
Helms, the conservative North Carolina Republican, "represents everything
to me that is ugly and wrong and awful about politics."
But
as the years passed, Mr. Wellstone moderated his personality if not his politics
and became well liked by Republicans as well as Democrats. Bob Dole, the former
Senate Republican leader who often tangled with Mr. Wellstone on legislation,
choked up today when he told a television interviewer that Mr. Wellstone was
"a decent, genuine guy who had a different philosophy from almost everyone
else in the Senate."
Mr.
Wellstone was also an accomplished campaigner. Though he had never held elected
office, he pulled off a major upset in 1990 when, running on a shoestring
budget, he defeated the incumbent Republican senator, Rudy Boschwitz. He beat
Mr. Boschwitz in a rematch in 1996. This year, he reneged on a promise to limit
himself to two terms, ran for re-election and seemed in the most recent public
polls to have pulled slightly ahead of his Republican challenger, former Mayor
Norm Coleman of St. Paul.
His
opponents always portrayed him as a left-wing extremist. Mr. Boschwitz's
television commercials in 1996 called Mr. Wellstone "embarrassingly liberal
and out of touch." This year, Mr. Coleman said the senator was "so far
out of the mainstream, so extreme, that he can't deliver for Minnesotans."
But
on the campaign trail, Mr. Wellstone appeared to be so happy, so comfortable, so
unthreatening that he was able to ward off the attacks.
For
years, he had walked with a pronounced limp that he attributed to an old
wrestling injury. In February, he announced at a news conference that he had
learned he had multiple sclerosis, but he said the illness would not affect his
campaigning or his ability to sit in the Senate. "I have a strong mind "
although there are some that might disagree about that " I have a strong body,
I have a strong heart, I have a strong soul," he told reporters.
Paul
David Wellstone was born in Washington on July 21, 1944, and grew up in
Arlington, Va. His father, Leon, left Russia as a child to escape the
persecution of Jews, and worked as a writer for the United States Information
Agency. His mother, Minnie, the daughter of immigrants from Russia, worked in a
junior high school cafeteria.
Growing
up, he was more interested in wrestling than politics, and he had some
difficulty in school because of what he later found out was a learning
disability. He scored lower than 800, out of a total of 1,600, on his College
Boards, and this led him as a senator to oppose measures that emphasized
standardized test scores. In an interview, he once said that even as an adult he
had difficulty interpreting charts and graphs quickly but that he had learned to
overcome his disability by studying harder and taking more time to absorb
information.
Partly
because of his wrestling ability " he was a conference champion at 126 pounds
" he was admitted to the University of North Carolina and, galvanized by the
civil rights movement, he turned from wrestling to politics. He graduated in
1965 and stayed in Chapel Hill for a doctorate in political science. He wrote
his thesis on the roots of black militancy.
Married
with children, he once said he did not have time to participate in the student
uprisings in the 1960's. He is survived by two grown sons, David and Mark, of
St. Paul, and six grandchildren.
But
while he was not a student rebel, Mr. Wellstone did not fit in from the day in
1969 when he began teaching political science at Carleton College, a small
liberal arts campus in rural Northfield, Minn.
He
was more interested in leading his students in protests than he was in
publishing in academic journals, and he was often at odds with his colleagues
and Carleton administrators. He fought the college's investments in companies
doing business in South Africa, battled local banks that foreclosed on farms,
picketed with strikers at a meat-packing plant and taught classes off campus
rather than cross a picket line when Carleton's custodians were on strike.
In
1974, the college told him his contract would not be renewed. But with strong
support from students, the student newspaper and local activists, he appealed
the dismissal, and it was reversed.
In
1982, Mr. Wellstone dipped his toe into the political waters for the first time
and ran for state auditor. He lost. But he had made contacts in the Minnesota
Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and he stayed active in politics. In 1988, he was
the state co-chairman of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's campaign in the presidential
primary, and in the general election, he was co-chairman of the campaign of
Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee.
Few
thought he had a chance when he announced that he would run for the Senate
against Mr. Boschwitz. Russell D. Feingold, now a like-minded liberal Democratic
senator from Wisconsin, today had this recollection of dropping by to meet Mr.
Wellstone in 1989:
"He
opened the door, and there he was with his socks off, 15 books open that he was
reading, and he was on the phone arguing with somebody about Cuba. He gave me
coffee, and we laughed uproariously at the idea that either of us would ever be
elected. But he pulled it off in 1990 and gave me the heart to do it in
Wisconsin."
Mr.
Feingold was elected in 1992, also with a tiny treasury.
Mr.
Boschwitz spent $7 million on his campaign, seven times Mr. Wellstone's budget.
To counteract the Boschwitz attacks, Mr. Wellstone ran witty, even endearing
television commercials produced without charge by a group led by a former
student. In one ad, the video and audio were speeded up, and Mr. Wellstone said
he had to talk fast because "I don't have $6 million to spend."
Mr.
Wellstone toured the state in a battered green school bus, and in the end, he
won 50.4 percent of the vote and was the only challenger in 1990 to defeat an
incumbent senator.
He
arrived in Washington as something of a rube. On one of his first days in town
before he was sworn in, he called a reporter for the name of a restaurant where
he could get a cheap dinner. When the reporter replied that he knew a place
where a good meal was only $15, Mr. Wellstone said $15 was many times what he
was prepared to spend.
He
also made what he later conceded were "rookie mistakes." At one point,
for instance, he used the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a backdrop for a news
conference to oppose the war against Iraq. Veterans' groups denounced him, and
he later apologized.
But
he soon warmed to the ways of the Senate and became especially adept at the
unusual custom of giving long speeches to an empty chamber. Probably no one in
the Senate over the last dozen years gave more speeches at night after nearly
all the other senators had gone home.
His
strength was not in getting legislation enacted. One successful measure he
sponsored in 1996 with Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico,
requires insurance companies in some circumstances to give coverage to people
with mental illness, but he failed this year in an effort to strengthen the law.
In
a book he published last year, "The Conscience of a Liberal" (Random
House), Mr. Wellstone wrote, "I feel as if 80 percent of my work as a
senator has been playing defense, cutting the extremist enthusiasms of the
conservative agenda (much of which originates in the House) rather than moving
forward on a progressive agenda."
In
a speech in the Senate this month explaining his opposition to the resolution
authorizing the use of force in Iraq, Mr. Wellstone stressed that Saddam Hussein
was "a brutal, ruthless dictator who has repressed his own people."
But
Mr. Wellstone went on to say: "Despite a desire to support our president, I
believe many Americans still have profound questions about the wisdom of relying
too heavily on a pre-emptive go-it-alone military approach. Acting now on our
own might be a sign of our power. Acting sensibly and in a measured way, in
concert with our allies, with bipartisan Congressional support, would be a sign
of our strength."
Later,
Mr. Wellstone told a reporter that he did not believe his stance would hurt him
politically. "What would really hurt," he said, "is if I was
giving speeches and I didn't even believe what I was saying. Probably what would
hurt is if people thought I was doing something just for political
reasons."
Mr.
Wellstone briefly considered running for president in 2000, but he called off
the campaign because, he said, the doctors who had been treating him for a
ruptured disk told him that his back could not stand the travel that would be
required.
Often,
Mr. Wellstone was the only senator voting against a measure, or one of only a
few. He was, for instance, one of three senators in 1999 to support compromise
missile defense legislation. He was the only one that year to vote against an
education bill involving standardized tests, and the only Democrat who opposed
his party's version of lowering the estate tax.
Mr.
Wellstone was one of the few senators who made the effort to meet and remember
the names of elevator operators, waiters, police officers and other workers in
the Capitol.
James
W. Ziglar, a Republican who was sergeant at arms of the Senate from 1998 to 2001
and who is now commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
remembered today "the evening when he came back to the Capitol well past
midnight to visit with the cleaning staff and tell them how much he appreciated
their efforts."
"Most
of the staff had never seen a senator and certainly had never had one make such
a meaningful effort to express his or her appreciation," Mr. Ziglar said.
"That was the measure of the man."
Copyright The New York Times Company
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