Movement liberal - Editor's Note

The loss of the Senate is a serious blow. But for me, the death of Senator Paul Wellstone is more devastating.

He was not a liberal in the traditional mold of Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy, or dare I say Walter Mondale. Nor was he a maverick liberal, like Russ Feingold. Instead, he was a movement liberal. He was an activist and a radical professor at Carleton College long before he became a politician. And even after winning a seat in the Senate, he recognized the importance of grassroots organizing for progressive change.

"Look, the fact of the matter is, we're not doing a very good job of organizing any longer," he told me in a radio interview back in 1997. "We've got to get back to that."

Wellstone liked to say he represented the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. "People don't see what the Democratic Party stands for as being connected to their lives. That's a real problem," he told me.

His Senatorial career was book-ended by opposition to war with Iraq. He was so outspoken about the 1991 Gulf War that he earned a famous sobriquet from President George H.W. Bush, who asked: "Who is that little chickenshit?" Then, this fall, at great risk to his political career, Wellstone voted against George W.'s authorization of force for another war on Iraq.

Throughout his career, he championed universal health care, the rights of the mentally ill, organized labor, women's rights, the environment, full public financing of elections, equitable funding of public education, decent child care, the family farmer, and the poor. He was a staunch opponent of Bill Clinton's 1996 so-called welfare reform law, and he virtually single-handedly stalled the pending bankruptcy legislation, which would impose onerous new burdens on the indigent.

He was not perfect. He failed to join Senator Russ Feingold in voting against the USA Patriot Act, he voted for Clintons omnibus crime bill, which added more than fifty capital crimes to the statutes, and he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

It was this last vote that caused him some self-recrimination, which he relates in his autobiography, The Conscience of a Liberal.

"What troubles me is that I may not have cast the right vote on DOMA," he writes. "I might have rationalized my vote.... When Sheila and I attended a Minnesota memorial service for Matthew Shepard, I thought to myself, `Have I taken a position that contributed to a climate of hatred?' ... I still wonder if I did the right thing."

Wellstone was a friend of The Progressive. He and his wife, Sheila, subscribed for thirty years, he told me. He wrote for us a couple of times in the early 1980s. And he not only contributed to our ninetieth anniversary issue in January 1999, he was a keynote speaker at our celebration, which occurred on the very day that he announced he would not be a candidate for President. Though his back was aching, he was full of his characteristic energy and wit. (An excerpt follows on the next page. And you can watch a video of it at www.progressive.org.)

"I have dedicated my life to the cause of economic justice and equality of opportunity for all Americans," he writes at the end of his autobiography. "The famous abolitionist Wendell Phillips was once asked, `Wendell, why are you so on fire?' He responded, `I'm on fire because I have mountains of ice before me to melt.' So do we."

Paul Wellstone breathed fire on those mountains.

COPYRIGHT 2002 The Progressive, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group