R.I.P. Paul Wellstone

Five years ago today was the Wellstone plane crash. We will be hearing a lot about him and his wife and daughter in the next few days. And although they aren’t being mentioned much, we might even hear a little about Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy who went down in the same plane.

I won’t write any special tribute at the moment. There will be plenty of them available elsewhere.. Likely in the next few days I might have a comment on one or more of the tributes I see or what happened in those days five years ago.

What I will post here is something I wrote October 29, 2002 to an out-of –state relative who asked.

Ray, any thoughts you would like to pass on about Wellstone? I never
followed him. But, from the media coverage, it sounds like he was a decent
person whose views I would disagree with most of the time. Of course, his
"goodness" may be inflated by the media who seldom act as critically in the
days following death as they might in the days before. I also think it is
interesting now to watch both parties try to make the most of the situation
and continue the campaign, while pretending to be waiting until after the
funeral stuff is over. Who are they kidding? Anyway, I would be interested
in the insights of my Minnesota political correspondent.

For perspective, the relative is a conservative type who lives in a red state and usually, if not always, votes Republican.

This is excerpted for general relevance, but not otherwise edited, from what I wrote then.

I first met Paul Wellstone 20 years ago when he was making an unsuccessful run for State Auditor and have seen him dozens of time since in large and small groups. I suspect that if I met him again he might recognize me, but I doubt he would recognize me by name, but it is hard to know. He did have an uncanny ability to remember names and faces, but any good politician is able to make you think that he/she knows you even if you have never met.

Paul Wellstone was an orator who could make a dull room come alive and even get the most blasé excited. He seemed to advocate what he believed and believe what he advocated much more than most political types I have known. He was one of those people labeled "liberal" who never seemed to think that looking out for the little guy meant looking out for the unborn, but he came across as somebody who honestly had those convictions. [I have become convinced that most politicians either favor "abortion rights" or "life" not as a matter of personal conscience, but as a matter of political expedience, the choice being determined by where they are, who they are around, and whom they are opposing. If Reagan and the Bushes and Hatch and Helms were/are really pro-life one must wonder why they did/have done so little for the pro-life cause domestically and continued to expand relations with China.]

He voted against letting W go to war in Iraq and many thought that was the end of his career, but polls were showing that the vote had not hurt him.

But I am getting a little sick of hearing about how perfect he was. When the Republicans came back to power in Congress in 1995 and Oklahoma City was bombed [and he was facing reelection in 1996] he voted for the "anti-crime" legislation of the time, creating both "midnight basketball" and a few dozen new federal capital offenses and tried to allay us with the idea that he accepted them both since the first was more important than the latter.

And this year I was relishing an encounter I had with him in 1994. I had raised a parliamentary question about whether [as the chairperson was about to do] it was proper to let our then-mayor, Norm Coleman, speak at our county-unit DFL convention as if he were an officeholder from our party when he had just been elected by running against us. While that matter was being resolved, Wellstone came by to speak.

Since the practice is usually to suspend everything to allow visiting dignitaries of such rank to speak [since they may well be trying to make a couple of dozen such stops a day], he started to speak. As part of his speech, he suggested letting Norm speak since the party needed to have a big tent and maybe Norm would come back inside. Needless to say, I lost that point of order. That Norm Coleman would be running neck-and-neck with him all of this year [although Wellstone had a 6% lead in the last Minnesota poll] seemed to have enough irony to amuse me.

I have known quite a few politicians and only a few that I actually think have served for the basic reason they really thought they could do something good for other people. A lot of others have seemed to think that they could do a lot of good for a lot of people [albeit the ideas of good and which people have varied a lot] while doing good for themselves, but doing good for themselves has seemed to be the first reason. I am not sure if Wellstone was one of the first type or not. He may have been, but I didn't know him well enough to say.