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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A longtime staffer recalls how the Minnesota senator took principled stands and cast principled votes -- and used them to win.
Oct 29, 2002 | Paul and Sheila Wellstone, along with their only daughter, Marcia, and five others, died Friday on a rainy, snowy fall day on northeast Minnesota's Iron Range. It is a remote area with a steelworkers'-union culture that goes back generations, and though it is heavily Democratic, it was a far cry from native soil for Paul and Sheila. Still, it was a place where this inseparable team felt at home.
Back in 1989, I'd traveled with Paul Wellstone in his beat-up maroon Chrysler LeBaron as he traveled through rural Minnesota to Duluth and the Iron Range, for exploratory meetings before his first Senate campaign. Paul would lie down in the backseat of the car complaining about his back, and we knew his back wasn't going to get any better if he ran. But Paul had a different worry -- how he'd be accepted during this swing outside the progressive Twin Cities. Even though he was a member of the Democratic National Committee, he had a reputation as a fiery speaker and protest organizer.
But Paul was a skilled organizer whose years of teaching enabled him to read his audience and engage them in conversation. On this trip Paul was cautious. He was the first potential candidate to make the rounds, and he didn't want to appear too pushy. Former vice president Walter Mondale had been out of politics for five years, since his unsuccessful presidential campaign against incumbent Ronald Reagan, and he had not yet indicated whether he would run for the Senate seat. Paul did not want to put anyone on the spot regarding commitments. He focused his meetings on how this race would help the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which is what the Democrats are called in Minnesota.
Paul spoke at a gathering in Tower, Minn., in a home that served as the last stop for Central American refugees en route to Canada. St. Louis County Commissioner Herb Lampa said: "Sounds to me like you really want to run. If you want to, you should just do it."
Paul was pumped as we drove through a light April snowfall to the next stop, the house of Gabe Brisbois, a political operative whose support would spread wide and deep. There aren't many hotels up on the Iron Range, so candidates need to collect guest-room or couch invitations along with donations and votes. After dinner Gabe gave Paul the key to his house. Paul didn't know what to say. He began delicately with, "I know Walter hasn't decided to run and I know you'd be bound to him ..." Gabe interrupted and said: "Paul, I'm giving you the key to my house because I'm supporting you." On our way home that night, I told Paul the race was ours to lose. He thought I was crazy but acknowledged that he had a chance if everything broke his way.
The race was on. Paul managed to lock up the Iron Range endorsements before the ground froze for six months, ensuring that his were the only lawn signs up during the caucus season. As Minnesota political legend goes, if you win the Range, you win the state. The influential steelworkers of the territory that bears their name were the first union to endorse Paul in his 1990 race.
Some have called Paul Wellstone the first 1960s radical elected to the Senate, but that misses the mark. He was the first "justice organizer" elected to the U.S. Senate. Instead of spending the '60s listening to the Jefferson Airplane and hitchhiking to Woodstock, Paul married his high school sweetheart and attended the University of North Carolina. He quit the UNC wrestling team after winning the Atlantic Coast Conference championship because he had to support Sheila and the first of their three children. Paul was not a '60s radical, but a person committed to family and justice.
Wellstone projected his sense of justice into the classes he taught as a political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. He encouraged his students to do active organizing in their communities. Paul and the students helped organize the rural poor people of Rice County who were having trouble finding affordable housing. When the college attempted to deny tenure to Wellstone, saying that he spent more time on organizing and too little time on academia, his students used the skills they'd learned from Paul to protest the decision. They won.
During the 1980s, as their kids got older, he and Sheila were able to devote more of their time to the struggle for justice. Paul helped organize the striking meatpackers at Hormel's Austin plant and supported the steelworkers on the Range as jobs evaporated in that industry. He stood with rural communities fighting a controversial power line, and he was arrested with farmers protesting bank foreclosures. He protested against U.S. policies in Central America. In all the years I traveled with Paul, there wasn't a picket line or protest he could ever pass without jumping out of the car to join it.
Wellstone combined his justice work with activism in Democratic Party politics. In 1984, he ran unsuccessfully for state auditor. He crisscrossed the state stumping at local party events and inspiring the party faithful. But Democrats continued to nominate seemingly "safe" candidates who failed to win the Senate seats vacated by Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. Hubert's son, Skip, suffered a telling double-digit loss in 1988.
It was in that same year that the seeds of Paul's Senate race were planted. As co-chair of Jesse Jackson's second-place finish in Minnesota's Democratic presidential primary, Wellstone helped bring new blood and experienced community organizers into the party. After Jackson lost, Wellstone moved over to co-chair the state's presidential campaign of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, and by doing so helped unify Minnesota Democrats, making it one of the few states won by the Democrats that year.
Anyone who heard Wellstone had to concede he was the best stump speaker the Democrats had. Even at contentious party conventions, his rousing speeches would bring delegates of all stripes to their feet. Paul had told me his cadenced style was developed from hearing civil rights leaders speak during his college days at North Carolina. And he never wrote a speech. About a half hour before an event, he would ask for quiet to prepare for his remarks. With his mind clear and his cadence carefully measured, the speeches were often inspirational.
Paul's activism brought him the respect of labor unions, farmers, peace and justice activists, pro-choice women, environmentalists, people of color, community organizers and the party faithful. So restless activists at that year's state DFL convention, looking toward the 1990 Senate race, added up all the disparate groups supporting Paul and formed what seemed to them a logical conclusion. At the convention that year, folks first began greeting Paul Wellstone, not quite jokingly, with the title "Senator."
