Journalists aren’t supposed to have political heroes
– something about revealing our biases, as if that press card in
our hatbands is granted at the cost of neutering our humanity.
Well, I have one: former Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. Four
years ago, Paul
– with his wife, daughter and five others – was killed in a
plane crash days before the election in which he sought, and likely
would have won, a third term.
Journalists aren’t supposed to have political heroes – something about revealing our biases, as if that press card in our hatbands is granted at the cost of neutering our humanity.
Well, I have one: former Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. Four years ago, Paul – with his wife, daughter and five others – was killed in a plane crash days before the election in which he sought, and likely would have won, a third term.
I knew Paul – everyone knew him as Paul – as a reporter in Minnesota in the 1990s. He was a political animal, and put Huey Long himself to shame with the way he could whip a crowd into a frenzy.
And while he was unquestionably liberal, Paul was not so easily pigeon-holed. He opposed war, but he supported traditional marriage. He was regularly pummeled by the Republicans anyway – “embarrassingly liberal” was about the nicest thing they said about him in three elections – but he could punch and counter-punch with the best. A high school wrestler and later a political science professor, Paul relished a good battle joined, and he was relentless in argument and debate.
What Paul was not was mean-spirited.
Even when the going got rough, as election day approached, he stubbornly resisted the chorus of advice pushing him to go negative. At the end of the day, his upbeat campaigns won over a majority of hearts and minds. The mud didn’t stick to Paul because he stuck to issues and ideas – and because he was just too nice a guy.
Every two years, in October, I find myself having a conversation with Paul in my head. It isn’t about issues. The conversation is about style, values and hope. And about pride.
Not the personal kind of pride that goeth before a fall. Paul talked loud and often about running the kind of campaign that the people of Minnesota could be proud of. It was no pose. Like Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey before him, he was a happy warrior in the best Minnesota tradition.
The conventional wisdom these days is that such campaigns are for chumps. The New York Times reported Wednesday that both sides in this year’s election are calling it “the most toxic midterm campaign environment in memory.”
In my conversations with Paul, I hear a kind of sadness for what we have become. Speak now against the day, he seems to say, when in a more sober climate we will look back and ask, what happened to our humanity?
What happened to honor and civility and agreeing to disagree?
The seed of how we will govern, Paul understood, is planted in how we campaign.
He might remind us of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. They are our gold standard for debate not because they were clean. With slavery a hot topic, neither candidate avoided the use of racial epithets. What distinguished those debates was the quality of rhetoric and argument.
Paul Wellstone first ran for the Senate in 1990, when the campaign rules were crumbling around him. Yet his highest goal was not winning – it was being able to go to bed each night feeling good about how he comported himself in the public square. Paul did it for his soul.
He may have been an historical anomaly, and whether his approach was beneficial to him politically is open to debate. I tend to the belief that it was an essential part of why people voted for him.
There have been many attempts to legislate or otherwise control behavior on the campaign trail. In 1997, Santa Clara County created a nonpartisan ethics commissions that had some success in policing the tone and substance of campaigns. It’s endorsement became a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, the loss of which had political consequences.
But for the most part these efforts have either died on the vine or been a waste of time. It is the content of one’s character, as Dr. King said, that matters in the end.
So every two years, as I survey the moral wreckage strewn on various campaign trails, Paul and I have a little talk, and I am reminded of his enthusiasm and faith in humanity. Paul Wellstone is my political hero not because he believed in this, or opposed that, but because of the joy he took in campaigning – and the opportunities public life gave him to help people.
John Yewell is a columnist and night city editor at the Monterey County Herald.
