Where Have You Gone, Paul Wellstone?

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/12/4500/

Where Have You Gone, Paul Wellstone?
by Pat Williams

snip//


We remember how the 1960s seemed filled with scenes of young people going door-to-door for their cause or candidates, traveling the byways in their crowded buses. They, too, were belittled. Wellstone used those same techniques to win election and re-election. He even had an old beat up green bus in which he and his wife and kids traveled across Minnesota. He understood how to connect with common people”in their homes, in the farm fields, and union halls.

Nope, Paul Wellstone was not a naïve ideologue out there on the fringe who, like most of our candidates, depend upon the paid mercenaries to do their campaigning for them; rather Paul did it the difficult, old-fashioned way”he earned the votes one at a time door-to-door; looking people in the eye and sometimes telling them what they might not have wanted to hearbut needed to know.

During those days five years ago immediately following the deaths of Paul, his wife and daughter, it was interesting and predictable to listen to how carefully some of Wellstone’s arch conservative fellow politicians chose their words, each strategically distancing themselves from his policy preferences by beginning their statements of condolences with words of separation: Utah’s Senator Orin Hatch”"Paul and I seldom saw eye-to-eye;” and Senator Jesse Helms”"Despite the marked contrast between Paul’s and my view” Yes, they may have been well-meaning, but nonetheless they and others of Paul’s conservative colleagues carefully chose words of purposeful separation from this senator, who through the years they had methodically painted as a “fringe soft liberal.” And one can’t help but notice that during these past five years, the country seems to have forgotten about Paul. And trust this”that memory lapse is just fine with those who voted wrong on the war, wrong on health care, wrong on the environment, and wrong on the catastrophe that is global warming.

This strategy of forgetfulness is purposeful, count on it. It is part and parcel of the efforts to denigrate policy progressives as weak and ineffective. Such consistent but intentional tactics are a relatively recent phenomenon. After all, can anyone recall a claim that Jack Kennedy was weak, or that Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman were ineffective, or that Teddy Roosevelt was a softy? Each of them was the progressive, the liberal in their time.

Paul Wellstone, like the 1960s that forged him, believed the rights of people were higher than the rights of corporations. One has to be darn tough to hold that view! He understood that wholesale deregulation of the private sector would result, as it has, in the excessiveness of the drug companies, Enron and, closer to home, the old Montana Power Company. You know, it’s easier not to do battle with those boys!

Those who marginalized Paul Wellstone in death as they did in life and now five years later dismiss him, have confused their own conceit with strength and Wellstone’s productive determination with weakness.

Be sure of this: there are a lot of Paul Wellstone’s out there–tough, progressive, independent thinkers, risk-takers, tired of the elite rich interests stacking the deck and lining their own pockets. And there are millions more just like them waiting, just waiting for a candidate, like Paul Wellstone, someone who is actually worth voting for.

[jeff30997]

1. Paul Wellstone is sleeping with th fishes...

I say murder.

[melody]

2. Agreed, he was murdered -- Cheney even threatened him beforehand n/t