 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
Liberalism�s Heart -- Paul Wellstone, 1944-2002
Harold Meyerson
"Of my three campaigns, this one has generated the most emotion, the most volunteers," Paul Wellstone told me on an unseasonably cool and beautiful late August afternoon, as his legendary green campaign bus bounced along down some Minnesota byway. "My supporters think there�s just so much at stake, so much to lose."
His supporters were audible at almost every turn in the road. Everybody in Minnesota knew Wellstone; everybody knew his bus, and as they saw it coming they would honk and wave, or, if dedicated Wellstone-haters, honk and give the finger.
And the people certainly came out to meet him. He was the genuine article, the radical professor who�d taught organizing to a generation of college kids, the pol who didn�t cut corners, who voted against welfare reform a few months before he was up for reelection in 1996, who voted against authorizing a preventive war in Iraq a few weeks before he was up for reelection this year. He didn�t vote as consultants would have him vote; he didn�t look as consultants would have him look (he was capable of looking scruffy in a new suit); he didn�t speak, not with all that jumping and shouting, as consultants would have him speak. Not that he disdained consultants; but his consultants understood that what you sold when selling Wellstone was his unconsultability: his conscience, his authenticity, his humanity. For those who couldn�t see it when he was alive, his death has made one thing clear: Wellstone was one of the most � and one of the few � beloved figures in American public life.
Paul Wellstone was the heart of American liberalism � in part because almost everything he undertook entailed some real risk, and correspondingly, some real courage. In this sense, he made himself the beneficiary of his difficulties. Within the small band of outstanding liberals on Capitol Hill, most everyone hails from a heavily-Democratic district or state. A Ted Kennedy can speak for the national liberal community without having to justify his every move in Massachusetts; a Henry Waxman can go after the Bush Administration with the zeal of a hungry D.A. without having to worry about the wavering allegiance of Santa Monicans. But Wellstone�s Minnesota has been balanced on a razor�s edge between Democrats and Republicans since the time of his first Senate campaign in 1990.
Wellstone�s liberalism had a prophetic aspect as well, or rather, two prophetic aspects. The first was his willingness to condemn the works of a mean time, to be the one senator to vote against even the most watered-down version of the latest laissez-faire panacea or display of social cruelty. The second was his willingness to go out in front of his colleagues by a year or two -- or 10. He was the one senator to go Seattle in 1999, expressing an opposition to corporate free trade that has spread to much of the Senate Democratic caucus in the years since. He was the only senator on the National Mall for a gay-and-lesbian rights demonstration in 1993, championing domestic partnership and gay-adoption legislation that many Democratic officials have since embraced. He was prematurely anti-Enron, thundering against skyrocketing CEO salaries and plummeting worker rights in the days before the corporate scandals once again made populism popular with pols.
It may have been Paul�s secular-humanist Jewishness that nudged him toward the prophetic tradition; When he quoted scripture, by the several accounts I�ve seen, it was usually the prophets. (By me, he just quoted Yiddish proverbs.) Comfortable in both his Jewishness and his left-universalism, Wellstone was also a long-time supporter of a two-state solution in the Middle East -- a tribune for many among the considerable number of American Jews who aren�t affiliated with the establishment American-Jewish organizations.
Wellstone�s particular form of 60s campus radicalism also made him comfortable with a more oppositional politics than his congressional colleagues could generally settle into. What Wellstone grasped was that by the time he took office, at the start of 1991, the country�s politics had moved so far to the right that flat-out opposition was often a moral and practical necessity. Happily, Wellstone�s radicalism was always one that celebrated America�s ideals and tried to hold the nation to them; he was, after all, a son of immigrants who came to the States escaping Soviet oppression.
Besides the tragedy of Paul�s death, there�s the bitch. And the bitch is that Wellstone was going to win big. Despite the fact that the White House had targeted him, above all other Democrats, for defeat; despite the fact that he was trumpeting his opposition to the war and to the Bush tax cuts in a state where Democrats didn�t pull down more than half the vote, he was going to win big. He had opened a small lead over his Republican opponent, former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, during the early summer, as the nation�s attention turned to the corporate scandals Wellstone had been warning of for years. When the White House began pushing for war in early September, he had fallen behind, but then, when he cast his vote against the war � the only Democratic member facing a close race in either house to break with the president -- he�d surged into the lead. A Minneapolis Star-Tribune poll released on the Monday of the week he died had him up, 47 percent to 41 percent.
For whatever infinitesimal consolation it may offer, Wellstone could feel the victory coming. It would have been a double vindication -- for the politics of conscience, of forthright liberalism; and for the politics of people, of investing money in the ostensibly thankless task of mobilizing the occasional voters. He was "determined to show" his Democratic colleagues, Wellstone told me, that "this is one way to win."
The sad fact is that Wellstone wasn�t isolated from his colleagues only in those instances when he took unpopular positions. He often waged lonely battles for positions that were quite popular, that could have given the Democrats a wedge issue � but that were opposed by the business interests into which his Democratic colleagues were mortally in hock.
When I was with him in August, he talked to me at length about the bankruptcy bill that Majority Leader Tom Daschle wanted to bring to floor for ratification when the Senate reconvened after Labor Day. Promoted by credit card companies (such as Citigroup, a major employer in Daschle�s South Dakota), the bill is designed to make it much harder for working- and middle-class Americans to discharge debt, though it creates some cozy loopholes for wealthy Americans facing the same dilemmas. (The bill was later stymied in the House by an ancillary dispute over abortion.)
"We need to be standing up for the ordinary citizens, not the banks," Wellstone said in weary exasperation. "I�ve told the leadership this again and again, they shouldn�t bring the bill to the floor. If they do � we�ll be on a real compressed schedule � I can hold it up for several days, maybe a week. I can jiu-jitsu it," said the onetime college wrestler, envisioning the amendments and filibusters and procedural votes he could force to block its passage. "I�m sure I can take up four days blocking this bill, which may be more time than they have. And" � this was the only obeisance to being a team player, taking the onus of failure off the leadership � "they can blame it all on me."
Daschle, on hearing of Wellstone�s death, called him "the soul of the Senate." And what does that make the Senate now that Paul Wellstone is dead?
Our politics � liberal politics, American politics � suffered a huge loss in that Minnesota forest last Friday. The shlumpy, funny, courageous mensch who died with his wife and daughter and friends in that plane fought harder for the values of American progressives than any other figure on the political stage, and by so doing inspired thousands of others to take up that fight themselves. Now the reel is running backward; the flesh has become word again. To the thousands of progressives he prodded and roused and inspired falls the challenge of animating it yet again.
November 18, 2002
Jewish World
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2001 |  |