CREDIT: Associated Press/Rodney White
SOON AFTER Paul Wellstone died while campaigning for a third term in the Senate, cars in Minnesota and elsewhere began sporting green bumper stickers that read, “W.W.W.D. What would Wellstone do?”
A college professor turned US senator from Minnesota, Wellstone’s fiery speeches and dogged campaigning for progressive reform earned him the title “the conscience of the Senate.” In 1991 he cast his first vote opposing US military action in the Persian Gulf; eleven years later, he cast his last vote against a resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to use force against Iraq.
Wellstone summed up his philosophy about why he was in the Senate by saying, “I don’t represent the big oil companies, the big pharmaceuticals or the big insurance industry. They already have great representation in Washington. It’s the rest of the people that need representation.”
Born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Wellstone grew up in Arlington, Virginia. His mother was a cafeteria worker and his father was a writer and federal employee. As a teenager, he was something of a juvenile delinquent, engaging in petty crime. He had difficulty in school because of what he later found out was a learning disability, and he did poorly on his College Board tests. As a senator he opposed educational measures that emphasized standardized test scores.
Wellstone’s positive outlet was athletics. Only five foot five, he was a champion wrestler, undefeated in several high school seasons. At the University of North Carolina, he won the Atlantic Coast Conference championship in his 126-pound weight class.
Wellstone earned his undergraduate degree in 1965 and stayed at the University of North Carolina to earn a Ph.D. in political science in 1969. From 1969 to 1989 he taught political science at Carleton College in Minnesota, got involved in local organizing campaigns, and encouraged his students to do the same. While teaching at Carleton he was arrested twice—once at a Vietnam War protest at the federal building in Minneapolis and a second time at a local bank, where he was protesting farm foreclosures. He challenged the college’s investments in companies doing business in South Africa, picketed with strikers at a meatpacking plant, and taught his classes off campus rather than cross a picket line during a strike by Carleton’s custodians.
Wellstone’s activism angered college administrators, who tried to fire him before he received tenure. Students waged an aggressive protest campaign to keep Wellstone. Eventually, political scientists from other schools were brought to campus to assess Wellstone’s work, and they gave him a positive review. Ironically, instead of being dismissed, Wellstone was granted tenure a year early.
Wellstone became active with Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, running unsuccessfully for state auditor in 1982. Wellstone cochaired Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign in Minnesota and then worked for the Michael Dukakis campaign after Dukakis won the Democratic nomination.
In 1990 Wellstone ran against US Senator Rudy Boschwitz, a well-financed two-term Republican who outspent Wellstone nearly seven to one. Wellstone focused on grassroots campaigning. He made his lack of financing an issue by running a humorous low-budget television commercial in which he rapidly introduced himself to voters, saying he had to talk fast because he could not afford much airtime. The commercial became an immediate hit.
A fixture of Wellstone’s campaign was a beat-up old school bus painted green and white with a speaker’s platform rigged onto the rear exit. Despite some last-minute smears by his opponent attacking Wellstone’s patriotism and religious integrity (supporters of the Jewish Boschwitz claimed that Wellstone was not a practicing Jew), Wellstone won 50.4 percent of the vote. He was the only challenger to defeat an incumbent senator that year.
When Wellstone met President George H. W. Bush at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, Wellstone, ignoring protocol, urged the president to spend more time on issues like education and cautioned him against invading Iraq. Irked by Wellstone’s hubris, Bush asked an aide, “Who is this chickenshit?”
While serving in the Senate, Wellstone remained an organizer. In Washington, DC, and back in Minnesota, he was frequently seen on picket lines and at rallies sponsored by labor, community, environmental, and other progressive groups. His speeches, often appearing to be delivered completely off-the-cuff, would crescendo wildly into loud, short jeremiads expressing indignation at the wrongs the rally was addressing.
Wellstone spent the majority of his Senate career in the minority party. In his 2002 book The Conscience of a Liberal, he acknowledged that he spent nearly 85 percent of his time defending against Republican attacks on working families. When the Democrats were in the majority in 1993–1994, he pushed for a Canadian-style single-payer health care system, in contrast to President Bill Clinton’s more modest reform proposal.
Wellstone opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and was an advocate of gun control laws and a proponent of abortion rights. He led legislative efforts to increase funding for vocational education, environmental protection, and teacher training. He fought for campaign finance and lobbying reforms. He criticized his fellow Democrat, President Clinton, for sending troops to Haiti without the consent of Congress. He was one of three senators to oppose the Bush administration’s attempt to relaunch the Star Wars national missile defense program. He was the only Democrat to oppose his party’s version of lowering the inheritance tax. He virtually single-handedly stalled proposed bankruptcy legislation that would have imposed onerous new burdens on the poor but would have benefited banks, credit card and car finance companies, and retailers.
In 1995 he and Senator Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, cosponsored a successful bill to require insurance companies to treat mental health patients the same as those who suffer other illnesses. (Wellstone’s older brother suffered from crippling depression.)
Even his senatorial colleagues who disagreed with Wellstone’s views acknowledged his extraordinary human decency. He was one of the few senators who spent time with and remembered the names of the waiters, elevator operators, police officers, and other Capitol Hill workers.
In 1996 Wellstone was the only senator up for reelection to vote against an overhaul of the nation’s welfare system, which Clinton signed that year. In a Senate speech, Wellstone predicted that low-income children would be hurt by the law. “They don’t have the lobbyists, they don’t have the PACs,” Wellstone said at the time. As Wellstone predicted, his opponent—former senator Boschwitz, in a rematch—used that and other votes against him. Boschwitz’s ads called Wellstone “Senator Welfare” and labeled him “embarrassing liberal and decades out of touch.” Wellstone ran a feisty campaign, using clever TV ads and the green school bus again. But this time, running as an incumbent, he raised roughly $3 million more than Boschwitz and won a landslide victory.
In 1997 Wellstone visited Mississippi to begin a nationwide “poverty tour,” similar to Robert F. Kennedy’s visit to the rural South in the 1960s. He sought to remind his Senate colleagues, the press, and the public that poverty remained a serious problem in the United States, despite the economic boom and low unemployment of the period.
Wellstone consistently had the most progressive voting record of any senator, but on two occasions he angered his liberal supporters. After the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center, Wellstone failed to join Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold in voting against the USA Patriot Act. And in 1996 he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to withhold legal recognition of same-sex unions from other states. He later questioned whether he had cast the right vote.
In 2002 Wellstone reneged on a promise to limit himself to two terms and ran for reelection. That year he also announced that he had multiple sclerosis, but he said it would not interfere with his campaign or Senate activities. He joked with journalists that it was fitting that he should be diagnosed with a “progressive” (that is, degenerative) illness.
The Republican Party and corporate lobby groups targeted Wellstone as the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbent and raised a huge campaign war chest to help former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman beat the progressive Democrat. President George W. Bush visited Minnesota twice to campaign and raise money for Coleman, and Bush’s father followed suit. Karl Rove, George W.’s key political adviser, oversaw the anti-Wellstone effort, steering money from the energy industry—upset by Wellstone’s persistent opposition to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—to support Coleman’s campaign. “There are people in the White House who wake up in the morning thinking about how they will defeat Paul Wellstone,” a senior Republican aide confided at the time. “This one is political and personal for them.”
Wellstone’s first television ads criticized Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. When Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize military force against Iraq, Wellstone was the only senator facing a tough reelection challenge to vote no. On the Senate floor, he spoke out against Bush’s “preemptive, go-it-alone strategy” and said it would undermine America’s reputation around the world.
Polls showed that a few weeks before election day, Wellstone had pulled slightly ahead of Coleman. Then, on October 25, 2002, just eleven days before the election, on his way to a funeral and a campaign event in rural Minnesota, Wellstone’s plane crashed near the Eveleth airport, killing the fifty-eight-year-old senator, his wife, Sheila, his daughter Marcia, three members of his staff, and two pilots. A memorial service for the Wellstones and other victims of the crash filled a 20,000 seat arena at the University of Minnesota. The Democrats picked former senator and vice president Walter Mondale to replace Wellstone in the campaign, but it was too late to wage an effective campaign. Minnesota voters elected Coleman.
Most obituaries described Wellstone as a quixotic radical, out of step with the times as a progressive in a conservative era. But Wellstone understood the importance of pushing the debate to the left while also fighting for concrete improvements in legislation. He was sometimes a lone dissenter, but at other times he used his position to rescue progressive amendments from oblivion. “He was always the last guy standing with the last amendment,” Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota, told the Los Angeles Times. “It was always about children, or the poor.” Wellstone liked to say that he represented the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”
Six years later, comedian Al Franken, a Minnesota native and one of Wellstone’s closest friends, beat Coleman to take back the seat for the Democrats. The Wellstones’ two surviving children, Mark and David, established Wellstone Action, a training center for progressive candidates and organizers, including college students.