Mourning in America
EDITORIAL Mourning in America It is no graveside cliche to say that the death of Paul Wellstone leaves a gaping void in American politics. Let's be clear about exactly where that gaping void...
...Most of those who watched this spectacle felt a disgust bordering on shame...
...Former president Bill Clinton appeared on the Jumbo-Tron yuk-yukking and giving thumbs-up signs, looking happier than he had since . . . well, since Ron Brown's funeral...
...This is a country with more gender-studies professors than cowboys, more guidance counselors than stevedores, more admissions officers than sleeping-car porters...
...The service blew a gigantic raspberry at that worldview...
...And yet it can be granted that our professors are under-represented in the political system...
...Iowa senator Tom Harkin's tribute to Wellstone as a man who "made a miner up on the Iron Range know that he was as important as the president of the United States" may have been true for some miners (and some presidents...
...And most bizarrely, Wellstone's treasurer and friend Rick Kahn staged a confrontation with Republican representative Jim Ramstad and three senators (Domenici of New Mexico, Brownback of Kansas, and DeWine of Ohio) that was reminiscent of a Maoist reeducation camp...
...GOP leader Ron Eibensteiner asked for equal air time, on the grounds that Minnesota's Democrats had exploited their colleague's death to bamboozle networks into running a three-and-a-half-hour campaign ad—and hardly anyone thought that was going too far...
...But the help they got was incidental to his larger struggle, which was to rescue the consciences of his fellow professors...
...On a personal level, excesses in time of mourning are something all decent people will both understand and forgive...
...This is not an observation we make sneering-ly...
...For decades now, America has employed far more people in education than in agriculture...
...With the help of the mob, Kahn sought to bully and shame these Republicans into abandoning their party and supporting Walter Mondale, taunting: "We can redeem the sacrifice of his life, if you help us win this election for Paul Wellstone...
...The late senator was treated as little more than one broken egg in a great get-out-the-vote omelet...
...Lott and Ventura walked out of the service, and Ventura announced he had changed his mind about appointing a Democrat to hold Wellstone's seat for the next two months...
...Minnesota's Republicans, after all, have every reason to be delighted with the political fallout from this "memorial service...
...The tendencies Well-stone represented are a real and serious corner of our political landscape...
...Millions of Americans—and 55 percent of Minnesota households— tuned in on television to watch a solemn commemoration and found a rally devoted to a politics that was twisted, pagan, childish, inhumane, and even totalitarian beyond their worst nightmares...
...But Paul Well-stone, a Carleton College political science professor, was the only senator the academic Left could call its own...
...The real sin was not against Wellstone's political foes (or the people his "mourners" cast as his foes) but against Wellstone himself...
...We don't doubt that his struggle helped rescue the poor on occasion...
...As has often been remarked in the days since, one clip in the video portion of the event showed Wellstone saying, "Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning...
...The pilots and aides who died with him were barely treated at all...
...Let's be clear about exactly where that gaping void lies...
...He's right...
...But such feelings arose from decency, not partisanship...
...Harkin may have been right to say that Wellstone fought "for those who mop our floors and clean our bathrooms, for those who take care of our elderly, take care of our sick, teach our kids, help our homeless...
...It's true that there are a few senators in near-total sympathy with their university constituents...
...This Machiavellian glibness in the face of death was what left viewers most uneasy...
...Television stations were flooded with angry calls, and the GOP received $150,000 in spontaneously generated phone contributions since the service...
...What must they think of the rest of us...
...It is in this context that the nationwide outrage over last week's "memorial service" for Wellstone at Williams Arena in Minneapolis is best understood...
...So who represents them in our Senate...
...Paul said his station felt "hoodwinked and embarrassed...
...We won't pretend to like this politics: With its obsessive focus on sexuality and race issues, its embrace of the anti-Western side in all conflicts, its combination of class privilege and class envy, its political correctness and its authoritarian speech codes, the leftism espoused almost unanimously on university faculties (and elsewhere) most often strikes us as irresponsible...
...One journalist at WCCO in Minneapolis-St...
...Even Rick Kahn's Maoist denunciations may quite well have been the product of genuine grief...
...The crowd of 20,000 booed a succession of people who had come to pay their respects to a dead colleague: Senate minority leader Trent Lott, Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and former Minnesota senators Rod Grams and Rudy Boschwitz...
...Even as we mourn Paul Wellstone—a man of integrity, candor, kindness, and wit—we ought to be on our guard against the aggression and inhumanity acted out in his name...
...It was a sinister incident, unexampled in recent American politics...
...But the poor were Well-stone's topic, not his constituency...
...Hillary Clinton comes to mind...
...Politics is about the improvement of people's lives...
...The Democrats' beyond-the-pale politicization of Wellstone's death opened the way for Republican Norm Coleman to begin campaigning again, his only chance of making up an 8-point poll deficit against Wellstone's replacement, former vice president Walter Mondale...
...One of our major political parties, or at least a sizable wing of it, appeared to be dancing a jig on the grave of a particularly beloved fallen comrade...
...As such, he was the living symbol of the most important, most elite, most interesting— and possibly most dangerous—wing of our contemporary "progressive" politics...
...Vice President Dick Cheney was disinvited from the affair...
...And if they don't help . . . ? Small wonder Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd was said to have apologized afterwards to his Senate colleague Domenici...
...Wellstone's constituency was academic leftists...
...Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors...
...As his own campaign got underway towards the end of last week, Walter Mondale urged us to be forgiving of the affair...
...There can be no question of condemning Wellstone's own sons for the chants they led onstage, reeling as they are from the loss of both parents and a sister...
...But that does not make them any less frightening as expressions of mass politics...
...He asked us to remember that the people on stage "were talking about loved ones in their family who lost their lives...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 9
