Paul Wellstone

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Paul Wellstone
U.S. Senator, Minnesota
In office January 3, 1991 – October 25, 2002
Preceded by	Rudy Boschwitz
Succeeded by	Dean Barkley
Born	July 21, 1944 Washington, D.C.
Died	October 25, 2002 Eveleth, Minnesota
Political party	Democratic-Farmer-Labor
Religion	Jewish

Paul David Wellstone (July 21, 1944 – October 25, 2002) was an American politician and two-term U.S. Senator from Minnesota. He was a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and was a professor of political science at Carleton College before being elected to the Senate in 1990. Wellstone was a liberal and a leading spokesman for the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. He served in the Senate from 1991 until his death in a plane crash on 25 October 2002, in the 102nd, 103rd, 104th, 105th, 106th, and 107th congresses. His wife, Sheila, and daughter, Marcia, also died in the crash. They had two other grown children, David and Mark, who now co-chair the Wellstone Action nonprofit group.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Term limits pledges 4 Presidential aspirations 5 Wellstone and Gulf War 6 Other key military action votes 7 Death 8 Aftermath 9 Electoral history 10 Notes 11 External links and references 11.1 Further reading

[edit] Early life

Wellstone was born in Washington D.C. to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, Leon and Minnie Wellstone, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. He attended Yorktown High School in Arlington. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a wrestling scholarship, graduating with a degree in political science in three years. He was an Atlantic Coast Conference champion.

Wellstone married in 1963. In 1965 he earned his B.A., and four years later was awarded a Ph.D. in Political Science. Wellstone's 1969 doctoral dissertation at UNC was "Black Militants in the Ghetto: Why They Believe in Violence."

During the 1970s, he became involved in community organizing, working with the working poor and other politically disenfranchised communities. The first organization he founded was the Organization for a Better Rice County, a group consisting mainly of single parents on welfare, which he organized to advocate for public housing, affordable health care, improved public education, free school lunches, and a publicly-funded day care center. During this same period, he also began organizing with union members, farmers, and liberal activists. Later, he would use these connections in his bid for the Senate.

He went on to become Professor of Political Science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught for 21 years until 1990. In the early 1970's, the Trustees of Carleton considered firing him, but his students held a sit-in that resulted in him becoming the youngest professor at Carleton to ever get tenure. In 1982, he ran for state auditor, but lost to Arne Carlson. In 1988, he was the Minnesota campaign manager for Jesse Jackson's Presidential campaign.

In 1990, Wellstone ran for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Rudy Boschwitz, beginning the race as a serious underdog. He won the election, after being outspent by a 7-to-1 margin. Wellstone played off of his underdog image by airing a number of quirky, humorous advertisements created by political consultant Bill Hillsman including "Fast Paul"[1] and "Looking for Rudy"[2], a pastiche of the 1989 Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Boschwitz was also hurt by a letter his supporters wrote, on campaign stationery, to members of the Minnesota Jewish community days before the election, accusing Wellstone of being a "bad Jew" for marrying a Gentile and not raising his children in the Jewish faith. (Boschwitz, like Wellstone, is Jewish.) Wellstone's reply, widely broadcast on Minnesota television, was, "He has a problem with Christians, then." Boschwitz was the only incumbent U.S. senator to lose re-election that year.

Wellstone defeated Boschwitz again for re-election in 1996. During that campaign, Boschwitz ran ads accusing Wellstone of being "embarrassingly liberal" and calling him "Senator Welfare". Boschwitz accused Wellstone of supporting flag burning, a move which some believe backfired.^{[citation needed.]} Prior to that accusation, Boschwitz had significantly outspent Wellstone on campaign advertising and the race was closely contended, but Wellstone went on to beat Boschwitz by a nine-point margin.

Wellstone's upset victory in 1990 and subsequent re-election in 1996 was also credited to a massive grass-roots campaign, which inspired college students, poor people and minorities to get involved in politics for the very first time. In 1990, the number of young people involved in the campaign was so notable that shortly after the election, Walter Mondale told Wellstone that "the kids won it for you." Wellstone also spent a large portion of his Senate career working with the Hmong community in Minnesota, an immigrant community that had not traditionally been involved in American politics. Wellstone also spent a great deal of his Senate career cultivating the veterans community.

[edit] Career

In 2002, Wellstone campaigned for re-election to a third term against Republican Norm Coleman, the two-term mayor of St. Paul, formerly a Democrat who had chaired Wellstone's 1996 re-election campaign. Earlier that year he announced he had a mild form of multiple sclerosis, causing the limp he had believed was an old wrestling injury.

Wellstone was known for his work for peace, the environment, labor, and health care; he also joined his wife Sheila to support the rights of victims of domestic violence. He made the issue of mental illness a central focus in his career.[3] He was a solid supporter of increased immigration in the U.S. [4] He opposed the first Gulf War in 1991 and, in the months before his death, spoke out against the government's threats to go to war with Iraq again. He was strongly supported by groups such as Americans for Democratic Action, the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, and People for the American Way.

However, Wellstone's record was not always perceived as progressive. In 1996 (facing a bitter re-election fight against Boschwitz), he voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and also excluded gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered married couples from receiving equal treatment under federal immigration, tax, welfare, Social Security and inheritance legislation. 1996 Roll Call for H.R. 3396 His vote angered many of his long-time supporters in the LGBT community, and it didn't help his cause when he explained that he voted because he didn't believe in re-defining marriage. However, he later asked his supporters to educate him on the issue and by 2001, when he wrote his autobiography, "Conscience of a Liberal," Wellstone admitted that he had made a mistake. After voting against the congressional authorization for the war in Iraq on October 11, 2002, in the midst of a tight election, Wellstone is said to have told his wife, "I just cost myself the election." However, polls conducted the days following his vote against the resolution showed him leading Coleman by 6 – 9%, previous polls showed him trailing or leading by only 2 – 3%.

In the 2002 campaign, the Green Party ran a candidate against Wellstone. Some Greens opposed this move. The party's 2000 Vice-Presidential nominee, Winona LaDuke, described Wellstone as "a champion of the vast majority of our issues". [5] The Green Party's decision to oppose Wellstone was criticized by some progressives. [6]

Wellstone was the author of the 'Wellstone Amendment' added to the McCain-Feingold Bill for Campaign Finance Reform, in what came to be known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. The law, including the Wellstone Amendment, was challenged as unconstitutional by groups and individuals including the California State Democratic Party, the National Rifle Association, and Republican Senator Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate Majority Whip, with critics agreeing on both sides of the political spectrum. [7] On Wednesday, December 10, 2003, the Supreme Court issued a ruling upholding the key provisions of McCain-Feingold, including the Wellstone Amendment; the vote on the court was 5 to 4. The law as it stands prevents special interest groups, such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and People for the American Way from talking about any political candidate for 60 days before a general election, in what many critics had assumed would be protected speech on the basis of First Amendment rights. [8]

Wellstone was in a line of left-of-center or progressive Senators of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). The first three, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale, were all prominent in the national Democratic Party. Shortly after joining the Senate, South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings approached Wellstone and told him, "You remind me of Hubert Humphrey. You talk too much."

[edit] Term limits pledges

The day after being elected to the Senate in 1990, Wellstone said he pledged to serve no more than two terms in the U.S. Senate. Appearing on Minnesota Public Radio's "Morning Edition," Wellstone stated: "I'm not planning on staying there forever. I said 12 years on purpose. I don't see this as being a life-long thing. I want to give it two terms, everything I have." Wellstone also campaigned on the issue when he won re-election in 1996. But in January 2001, Wellstone said times had changed since he made that pledge and that he no longer intended to honor it: "I very honestly believed then that this would be the plan; that it made sense to give it everything for two terms. Just as I honestly believe now that who would have ever believed these circumstances?"MPR Story and audio clip

[edit] Presidential aspirations

Shortly after his re-election to the Senate in 1996, Wellstone began contemplating a run for his party's nomination for President of the United States in 2000.

As the first stage in his nascent pseudocampaign, he embarked upon a cross-country speaking and listening tour that he dubbed "the Children's Tour" in May of 1997. This tour, which took him to rural areas of Mississippi and Appalachia and the inner cities of Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, was intended to retrace the steps taken by Senator Robert F. Kennedy during a similar tour in 1966, in order to showcase the fact that conditions had not improved, as well as to test his message.

The following year, 1998, Wellstone began to more openly investigate the possibility of running. He formed an exploratory committee which paid for his travels to Iowa and New Hampshire, homes of the two first contests of the nomination process, to speak before organized labor and local Democrats. (His catchphrase from these speeches, "I represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party," would later be incorporated into the 2004 stump speech of Governor Howard Dean.) He also met privately with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, allegedly to determine which of them would challenge Vice President Al Gore from the left in 2000.

During this time, a college student named Paul Hogarth designed and put up Wellstone2000.com, a website intended to drum up grassroots support for Wellstone's candidacy. By the time it completed its two-year run, the site had led to the recruitment of nearly 700 official members into the Draft Wellstone movement, had sold hundreds of "Wellstone 2000" political buttons, and had led to the formation of "Students for Wellstone" clubs on campuses across the country.

Then, on January 9, 1999, Wellstone called a press conference in the Minnesota capitol building. Rather than announcing his candidacy, as had been expected, he instead declared that he would not be a candidate. His explanation was that his old wrestling injury (in reality, multiple sclerosis) prevented him from mustering the stamina necessary for a national campaign. Later that year, he would endorse the candidacy of former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, the only Democrat to run against Gore.

[edit] Wellstone and Gulf War

Senator Wellstone voted against authorizing the use of force before the Gulf War on January 12, 1991 (the vote was 52-47 in favor)[9]. He also voted against the use of force before the Iraq War on October 11, 2002 (the vote was 77-23 in favor) [10]. Wellstone was one of 11 Democratic senators to vote against both the 1991 and 2002 resolutions.

[edit] Other key military action votes

Wellstone supported requests for military action by President Clinton, including troop deployment, missile launch, and bombing: Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), Iraq (1998) and Kosovo (1999).

[edit] Death

On October 25, 2002, Wellstone died, along with seven others, in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, at approximately 10:22 a.m. He was 58. The other victims were his wife, Sheila, one of his three children, Marcia, the two pilots, and campaign staffers Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy. The plane was en route to Eveleth, where Wellstone was to attend the funeral of Martin Rukavina, a steelworker whose son Tom Rukavina serves in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Wellstone decided to go to the funeral instead of a rally and fundraiser in Minneapolis attended by Mondale and fellow Senator Ted Kennedy. He was to debate Norm Coleman in Duluth, Minnesota that same night.

The Beechcraft King Air A100 plane crashed into dense forest about two miles from the Eveleth airport, while operating under instrument flight rules as required for weather conditions of freezing rain and snow. The charter plane Wellstone was traveling in had no flight data recorders. Both pilots tested negative for drug or alcohol use. Icing was considered and rejected as a significant factor in the crash.

The NTSB later determined that the likely cause of the accident was the failure of both the pilot and copilot to maintain a safe minimum airspeed, leading to a stall from which they could not recover. Fatigue could have affected this, as the day before the crash the pilot had flown an unexpected trip from 3:00 am - 9:30 am and then worked a nursing shift from 6:00 pm - 10 pm. He was awake by 7:15 on the morning of the crash[11]. Wellstone's flight departed St. Paul at about 9:37 a.m. the following morning. However, both of the pilots would have had to fail in their task of monitoring the airplane's instrumentation and in-flight behavior, which would have given ample warning of an impending stall.

Michael L. Guess, the First Officer, was characterized in the NTSB report as being "below average" in proficiency.[12] Significant discrepancies were also found in pilot Richard Conry's flight logs in the course of the post-accident investigation. [13] He also had a well-known tendency to allow copilots to take over all functions of the aircraft as if they were the sole pilot during flights. After the crash, three copilots told of occasions in which they had to take control of the aircraft away from Conry. After one of those incidents, only three days before the crash, the copilot had urged Conry to retire [14]. A few months before the crash, Conry told another pilot, Timothy M. Cooney, a childhood friend, that he had difficulty piloting and landing King Airs [15]. The copilot Guess was cited by coworkers as having to be consistently reminded to keep his hand on the throttle and maintain airspeed during approaches [16]. He had been fired from two previous piloting jobs for incompetence. Because of the poor qualifications of the pilots, Wellstone's death is a popular subject of conspiracy theories in Minnesota.

The final two radar readings detected the airplane traveling at or just below its predicted stall speed given conditions at the time of the accident [17].

[edit] Aftermath

Wellstone's death came just 11 days before his potential re-election in a crucial race to maintain Democratic control of the Senate. Campaigning was halted by all sides. Wellstone's death during a US Senate race was the fourth in recent decades. Governor Mel Carnahan of Missouri was killed in a plane crash in 2000 weeks before an election. Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz and six other people were killed on April 4, 1991, when a Bell 412 State Police helicopter collided with the Senator's Piper Aerostar plane over Merion Elementary School in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania. All aboard the two aircraft and two children playing outside the school were killed. Congressman Jerry Litton, also of Missouri, died in a plane crash in 1976 on the day he was nominated by his party. Richard "Dick" Obenshain of Virginia died in a plane crash in 1978 shortly after receiving the GOP nomination.

Minnesota law required that his name be struck from the ballot, to be replaced by a candidate chosen by the party. The replacement candidate was former Vice President Walter Mondale, who accepted the nomination and later lost the election to Republican Norm Coleman.

The 20,000-capacity memorial service for Wellstone and the other victims of the crash was held in Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota and was broadcast live on national TV. Many high profile politicians attended the memorial, including Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Trent Lott, and Tommy Thompson. The White house offered to send Vice-President Dick Cheney to the service, but the Wellstone family declined.[18] After Rick Kahn began urging that the crowd should win the election for Wellstone and that Republicans should stop their opposition to the Senate seat, Governor Jesse Ventura stormed out of the service in disgust, later explaining both major parties were politicizing the event. Later in the service, Wellstone's personal eulogy was delivered by Senator Tom Harkin, another notable Democrat and Wellstone's close friend in the Senate, who urged those present to "stand up for Paul" in the election.

The event was criticized for its tone. Governor Jesse Ventura, who had the option to pick a replacement senator to serve out the remainder of Wellstone's term through January 2003, went so far as to declare he would solicit resumés for the senatorial position from everyone except Democrats. On the other hand, the pre-election outrage swirling around Wellstone's memorial was condemned by Democrats, like radio personality Al Franken, who was at the memorial and claimed that the outrage was overblown in order to damage the Democratic candidate running as Wellstone's replacement. In his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Franken asserts that all of the Republicans who claimed the memorial service was "hijacked" by the left confessed to him that they had not watched the entire memorial; Tucker Carlson even erroneously called it a "funeral." He also accused Jesse Ventura of "chomping gum throughout the service" and "showboating" by leaving during the obviously bereaved Kahn's speech. Some believe that the memorial played a major role in the election of Republican Norm Coleman.^{[citation needed]}

On the other hand, Don Hazen, executive editor of Alternet, wrote of Wellstone's passing, "Progressives across the land are in shock as the person many think of as the conscience of the Senate is gone." [19]

On November 4, the day before Election Day, Ventura appointed state planning commissioner Dean Barkley of the Independence Party to complete remaining two months of Wellstone's Senate term.

Wellstone is survived by his sons David and Mark and six grandchildren. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations has created the AFL-CIO Senator Paul Wellstone Award for supporters of the rights of labor. Presidential candidate Howard Dean and California state senator John Burton both received the first award in January 2003. In 2004, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill dedicated the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Memorial Garden as a tribute to the couple, both alumni of the university.

Near the site of his plane crash, a memorial to the Wellstones was dedicated on September 25, 2005. His distinctive green bus was present, as well as hundreds of supporters and loved ones. The Senator and his wife were laid to rest at Lakewood cemetery in Minneapolis, the same cemetery in which Vice President Hubert H. Humphry was interred. A memorial sculpture near Lake Calhoun marks their gravesites. His legacy continues as Wellstone Action, a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that trains citizens and potential candidates with a progressive agendum.^[1][2][3][4]

[edit] Electoral history

• 1996 Race for U.S. Senate
  • Paul Wellstone (DFL) (inc.), 50%
  • Rudy Boschwitz (R), 41%
  • Dean Barkley (Ref.), 7%

• 1990 Race for U.S. Senate
  • Paul Wellstone (DFL), 50%
  • Rudy Boschwitz (R) (inc.), 48%

• 1982 Race for State Auditor
  • Arne Carlson (R) (inc.), 55%
  • Paul Wellstone (DFL), 45%

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links and references

• Get Out The Vote!
• MnWPC eWomen Win
• Live Events: (October 25, 2003)
• Wellstone Action, an advocacy group organized by Wellstone's survivors.
• Wellstone documentary home page
• Senator, family members killed in Minnesota plane crash, CNN, October 25, 2002
• Friends Recall Dreamer, Roll Call, October 28, 2002
• Congress Mourns Wellstone, Roll Call, October 28, 2002
• Minnesota Crash Kills Wellstone Amid Senate Fight, The New York Times, October 26, 2002
• Minnesota Senator Is Among 8 Dead in Crash, The New York Times, October 25, 2002
• THE SENATOR: Paul Wellstone, 58, Icon of Liberalism in Senate, Dies, The New York Times, October 26, 2002 obituary
• THE FAMILY: A Lifetime Together, Serving the People, The New York Times, October 26, 2002
• Specter of War Sets Debate in a Tight Race in Minnesota, The New York Times, October 5, 2002
• Minnesota Swing Voters Are Seen as Crucial in Senate Race, The New York Times, March 10, 2002
• Senator Wellstone of Minnesota Says He Has Multiple Sclerosis, The New York Times, February 25, 2002
• Aircraft Accident Report: Loss of Control and Impact With Terrain Aviation Charter, Inc. Raytheon (Beechcraft) King Air A100, N41BE Eveleth, Minnesota October 25, 2002, National Transportation Safety Board, report number AAR-03-03, adopted on November 18, 2003
• The Voice of Paul Wellstone
• Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?

[edit] Further reading

• Casper, Barry (Mike), Lost in Washington: Finding the Way Back to Democracy in America, University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
• Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs) and Fetzer, Jim, American Assassination: the Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone, Vox Pop, 2004.
• Lofy, Bill, Paul Wellstone: The Life of a Passionate Progressive, University of Michigan Press, 2005
• Lofy, Bill, Politics the Wellstone Way: How to Elect Progressive Candidates and Win on Issues, University of Minnesota Press, 2005
• McGrath, Dennis J. and Smith, Dane, Professor Wellstone Goes to Washington: The Inside Story of a Grassroots U.S. Senate Campaign, University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
• Wellstone, Paul, The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda, University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
• Wellstone, Paul, How the Rural Poor Got Power: Narrative of a Grass-Roots Organizer, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
• Wellstone, Paul, and Barry Casper, Powerline: The First Battle of America's Energy War, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Preceded by Rudy Boschwitz

United States Senator (Class 2) from Minnesota 1991 – 2002 Served alongside: David Durenberger, Rod Grams, Mark Dayton

Succeeded by Dean Barkley