Paul
Wellstone, the son of Russian-Jewish
immigrants, was born in Washington, on 21st July, 1944. After high
school he attended the University of North Carolina, where he obtained
a BA (1965) and a doctorate in political science (1969). As a student
he was active in the anti-Vietnam War campaign.
Wellstone
taught at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, for twenty-five
years. He was also director of the Minnesota Community Energy Program.
A
member of the Democratic Party, Wellstone
helped organize support for Jessie Jackson
during his unsuccessful presidential bid in 1988. He remained active
in politics and in 1990 Wellstone defeated the Republican
Rudy Boschwitz to win a seat in the Senate. In 1996 he beat Boschwitz
by a larger margin.
Wellstone
developed a reputation as the most left-wing member of the Senate.
He supported gun control, abortion rights and was a strong opponent
of military intervention in Iraq.
Paul
Wellstone died in a plane crash d on 25th October, 2002 during an
election campaign. His wife of nearly 40 years, Shelia Ison, and their
33-year-old daughter Marcia, also died in the accident. Wellstone's
replacement, Walter
Mondale, was defeated by the Republican,
Norm Coleman,
in the November, 2002 Senate election.
(1)
Steve Perry, Mojo Magazine (January, 2001)
It's difficult now
to recall the giddy sense of possibility that greeted Paul Wellstone's
1990 election to the U.S. Senate. Running against Minnesota Republican
Rudy Boschwitz, a popular and seldom controversial incumbent with
a $7 million war chest, he was widely considered the burnt offering
of a state Democratic Party that had never really wanted him in the
first place. Only weeks before Election Day, polls showed him running
16 points behind. Wellstone eventually triumphed by running a low-budget
campaign that was risky, inventive, populist in tone, and unabashedly
left-liberal. In so doing, he became the only candidate to unseat
a Senate incumbent that year. If popular disgust for Beltway elites
has become a matter of conventional wisdom in the decade since, it
is easy to forget that Wellstone's improbable win was among the first
portents compelling the discomfited hordes of Washington pundits and
party leaders to admit there was trouble in the air.
Wellstone quickly made
a name for himself - first by openly denouncing the racist politics
of Jesse Helms and his kind, and soon thereafter by emerging as one
of the most vociferous critics of the war in the Persian Gulf. In
the latter capacity, he made the rounds of TV talk shows and staged
a controversial, emotionally charged press conference in front of
the Vietnam War memorial. He was the "Senator from the Left,"
exulted The Nation's David Corn. Mother Jones held him up as "the
first 1960s radical elected to the US Senate." George Bush offered
a more withering assessment: "Who is this chickenshit?"
he muttered after being grilled by Wellstone at a reception for new
members of Congress.
(2)
Jeff Taylor, Counterpunch (13th August, 2002)
Wellstone showed
limited opposition to the military action of a Republican president,
but when it came to Bush's Democratic successor, Wellstone was a virtual
cheerleader. He supported every single Clinton troop deployment, missile
launch, and bomb drop: Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995),
Iraq (1998), and Kosovo (1999). This record makes a person wonder
if Wellstone's principles aren't severely diluted by partisanship.
Is his political philosophy as simple-minded as Democrat=good, Republican=bad?
Maybe. Unlike Democrats and Republicans, Greens in the US Senate wouldn't
have to continually compromise their instincts and principles in order
to please their party leader in the White House.
(3)
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent (28th October, 2002)
In the Senate Wellstone
was its most liberal member, as he liked to put it, "from the
Democratic wing of the Democratic Party", who did not hesitate
to accuse Bill Clinton of selling the party's soul. Soon after he
was elected, he described Jesse Helms, the curmudgeonly Republican
conservative from North Carolina, as "everything to me that is
ugly and wrong and awful about politics".
Over the years, Wellstone
would mellow. He led some notable bipartisan initiatives with ideological
foes like Sam Brownback of Kansas, and was one of the most liked and
respected members of the Senate club – "a decent, genuine
guy", in the words of the former Republican majority leader Bob
Dole. A tower of strength was Wellstone's wife Sheila, his high-school
sweetheart and the other half of one of Congress's most admired domestic
political partnerships – and who died with her husband and their
daughter in a plane crash on Friday, on the way to a funeral.
Never did Wellstone lose
the courage of his convictions. Hardly had he arrived in the Senate
in 1991 than he was voting against the Gulf War to drive Saddam from
Kuwait. This month, he was the only Senate Democrat facing a tough
re-election fight to vote against authorizing President George W.
Bush to use force against Saddam Hussein. Predictably, Wellstone's
adopted Minnesotans were not bothered in the slightest.
(4)
Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
(26th October, 2002)
Paul Wellstone, called
the conscience of the US Senate for his passion and liberal convictions,
was killed in an air crash yesterday, in the final days of a knife-edge
mid-term election campaign.
Wellstone, 58, was seen
as a symbol of the anti-war movement for voting against President
George Bush earlier this month on the resolution authorizing the use
of force against Iraq, a stand that gave this contest in Minnesota
national significance.
He was killed with his
wife and daughter, three campaign staff and two pilots when their
small propeller plane went down in icy rain at Eveleth, in north-eastern
Minnesota.
His death has shocked Minnesota,
where he was seen as a defender of the voiceless and the environment,
a man who gave a small state a higher than usual profile in Washington.
It also threw into chaos a race seen as crucial to control of the
Senate, where the Democrats hold a narrow majority.
By the time voting gets
under way on November 5, each side in the race is expected to have
spent upwards of $10m - about $2 for each Minnesota resident.
The race for the Minnesota
Senate seat, which Wellstone held for 12 years - two terms - was perhaps
the most closely followed in the country, not only because of its
importance to the future of the house, but because Wellstone's stand
on Iraq had been seen as courageous, but political suicide.
Mr. Bush personally intervened
to anoint Wellstone's challenger, Norm Coleman, and has visited the
state three times to campaign on his behalf.
Wellstone, a college professor
who turned his lectures on grassroots organising and protest politics
to good use, was the only senator facing re-election to oppose military
action against Iraq.
The conventional wisdom
in Washington was that would ensure his losing. "At one time
even I felt that if I voted that way, I would certainly lose, but
I don't feel that way now," he told the Guardian on Thursday.
In fact, he believed people
would have lost respect for him had he taken a more expedient route.
"I think people are being very respectful. I think it is more
important to people that I rendered the right decision for me in spite
of their politics."
(4)
Matthew Engel, The Guardian (7th
November, 2002)
The last hurrah of
the ageing leader is an ancient motif of US politics. Even in normal
circumstances the tears are never far away when a once-great figure
goes down to his final defeat.
The brief, bizarre and
tragedy-tinged closing chapter of Walter Mondale's career came to
an end in a hotel ballroom just before 10am when he conceded defeat,
with grace and good humour, to the brash and breezy Republican Norm
Coleman, the new senator from Minnesota.
Then the 74-year-old former
vice-president and presidential candidate shuffled off the stage,
literally and figuratively, back to the comfortable oblivion he left
less than two weeks ago.
By then the hall was deserted,
except for the media and 100 or so remaining supporters, to whom this
was the final moment of desolation.
Mr Mondale came out of
retirement to take over the campaign when Paul Wellstone, the former
senator and standard-bearer of the Democratic party's left, was killed
in a plane crash.
Wellstone's adoring supporters
were kept going through their grief by the adrenaline of battle and
the determination to win in his memory, Now, at last, many of them
broke down and hugged each other, silent except for their sobs.
At the end of a terrible
fortnight for them, and a terrible night for their party, there was
nothing anyone could say.
Mr Mondale spoke to young
activists, who in Minnesota had been galvanised by Wellstone's uncomplicated
and unfashionable sense of injustice.
"It's important for
you to know that your ideals are tested more in defeat than victory,"
he said. "This is not the end but the beginning of what you can
do. You will be needed now more than ever. You are the future. Stand
up and keep fighting."
Fighting for what, though?
During the long night, well before the reality of their own defeat
had set in, there was a sense of futility developing among the Minnesotan
Democrats. It can only have been echoed, if a little less passionately,
elsewhere in the country.
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