WHAT WAR?:

Politics with People, Reinvented: Paul Wellstone wants to win it clean -- with zeal, volunteers and a new-model, old-fashioned campaign. (Harold Meyerson, September 23, 2002, American Prospect)

For progressives, Wellstone has all too often been a prophetic tribune at least several years ahead of his Democratic colleagues. He was the one senator to go to Seattle in 1999, where he excoriated laissez-faire globalization; the one senator on the National Mall for a gay- and lesbian-rights demonstration in 1993, where he championed domestic-partner and right-of-adoption legislation; the one senator to consistently highlight the perils of corporate power in those market-mad pre-Enron days.

On the campaign trail today, Wellstone is a profile in prudent courage. Meeting one morning with a group of county and township supervisors in a rural area north of the Twin Cities, Wellstone pledges his continuing commitment to winning federal funds for a light-rail line connecting the area to Minneapolis. The supervisors are a bipartisan bunch; while they applaud Wellstone's efforts on behalf of the transportation corridor, many have little enthusiasm for the more global aspects of Wellstone's agenda.

Plainly, Wellstone's under no obligation to promote broader issues, but he does. The rail line, he says, is just one of a number of investments that the state and the nation must make to improve schools, housing and transportation. "But you can do just so much in investments as long as we have these tax cuts," he says. "Now, the Bush tax cuts have us running a deficit, and some people are saying there's no money for projects like this one. So we need to look at the tax cut again. I'm not saying I know what the proper balance between cuts and investments is, but I am saying we need more for investments."

Wellstone's tone is studiedly unpopulist, but he is calling for repealing the very large share of the cut that goes to the rich, even as most of his Democratic colleagues cheerfully support new programs without so much as mentioning the tax cut that aborts them. "I know consultants are saying we shouldn't be talking about this," Wellstone tells me, "but there's an old Yiddish proverb: You can't dance at two weddings at the same time. You have to be honest: Where else would the resources for the investments we support come from?"

That Wellstone is willing to push past the conventional wisdom on so controversial an issue in so close a race endears him to his activist base even more. "I believe in Paul's conscience," says Karen Jeffords, a mental-health worker who's supported Wellstone in his two previous outings but who this year, for the first time, is volunteering.

It might be a little easier to take Mr. Meyerson's portrayal of Paul Wellstone as a unique politician of conscience if the Senator had the stomach to speak about his views on the central issue facing America today: the war. If terrorism or Iraq is even mentioned in this essay I sure missed it. The silence is entirely understandable, but it puts paid to the nonsense about his conscience. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 15, 2002 1:43 PM