WWWD?

From January 2005:

The legacy of Paul Wellstone is one of my personal guiding moral forces. The example of political courage he set throughout his career as a professor, an activist, and a legislator stands in stark contrast to the cynicism evident in too many of his former colleagues. Wellstone consistently voiced and voted his conviction, and the people of Minnesota rewarded him by twice sending him to the United States Senate.

Days after his untimely death in a plane crash during the final month of his third campaign, his memorial service was widely criticized for the buoyancy of the crowd and the partisan tone of the speakers. The negative spin took hold, and before long, people who hadn’t even seen the service were objecting to it, and most Washington Democrats were considering, believe it or not, the political consequences of the service.

But before the media was able to caricature the event, I had watched the entire (five-hour) service on C-Span and come away with a completely different conclusion: Would any other Senator’s death draw such an outpouring of emotion from his constituents? Would we see a capacity crowd of college students, working people, and families gather to pay tribute to any of them? I saw thousands of people longing for the kind of politics practiced by Paul Wellstone. For me, that was a defining moment in my own political conscience — and one of the moments I chose to reject the politics of capitulation.

With all the recent articles lately on the future of the Democratic Party, I’ve been thinking a lot about Wellstone — wondering if his colleagues ever consider his legacy of conviction politics. So far, I’ve been disappointed. As Bobby Kennedy once said:

Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields so uneasily to change.

It seems that I was not alone in remembering the Wellstone legacy lately. Anna Quindlen writes about the “ghost” of Paul Wellstone in the web edition of today’s Newsweek:

I miss Paul Wellstone. It is not that the senator from Minnesota was liberal, although he was, or smart, although he was that, too. It was that when he said he was going to do something, he did it, and because he believed it was the right thing, not because he’d been bought and paid for by lobbyists and pressure groups….

And while I don’t believe in ghosts, I hope the memory of Paul Wellstone will haunt the Democrats as they go about the very public business of finding themselves in the wake of their November defeat. Not because they will necessarily embrace his positions, but because they ought to assume his legacy of passionate conviction.

I couldn’t agree more. I wish every Democrat had learned the same lessons I learned from Paul Wellstone.