John Gilmore at Alpha talks about the left’s parade of garment-ripping over last week’s anniversary of Paul Wellstone’s death. Hint: it’s worthy of a North Korean or Cuban flood of ritual garment-ripping.
The whole thing is worth a read – but the pullquote is:
Yet the forced remembrances, the public displays of sadness and the brittle wistfulness for what could have been, only serves to highlight the bankruptcy of the Left, both in Minnesota and nationally. Paul Wellstone deserves another kind of memorialization, something other than the politicization of every aspect of modern day life.
Because the truth is, while Wellstone would never have voted for Donald Trump, he would have understood precisely why he won. Indeed, by this time, had he lived, he would likely have been seen as a Cassandra, cursed to speak true prophecies that no one believed, by his fellow democrats.
More unfortunately for democrats, Wellstone would have been able to advise them how best to recover from last year’s loss. Without him, they are left to look only to the past in their remembrances of his untimely death. Wellstone would have been the first to admonish them to look to the future.
Here’s the part I wonder about: Wellstone was someone who was rare in his day, and has almost vanished today – someone who respected and befriended people across the proverbial aisle who shared his passion for…whatever they did. He was friends in the Senate with Barry Goldwater, and attended his funeral; he was a friend and occasional guest-host for conservative talk show host and now CD2 Congressman Jason Lewis.
I’m wondering what the Dems’ purity police would do with him today, if he weren’t careful?
Wellstone would have fit into the Bernie/Insurgent democrat role. Disclosure: I was an original Wellstone guy, starting when I was a student at uber liberal Carleton. And was a friend afterwards. Through another unrelated connection I was a friend of Tom Lapic, the aide who also perished in the plane crash. But that’s another story. My support continued for a time until my career choice and the onset of adulthood forced me to view economics and politics from a different perspective. Wellstone was an old school gentleman. And a straight arrow. I had to laugh when the Boschwitz campaign foolishly tried to paint him as a pot smoking professor. I can’t see him fitting into the 21st century nasty strain of politics. He was the genuine article. I could see him running as an outsider democrat and possibly beating Trump because he connected well with populist movements and wasn’t tainted with corruption like Clinton.
I was not a fan of Wellstone’s politics but I believe he was the real article. A man who walked the walk as they say. I remember stories where he would be flying coach from DC to home and get out of his seat on the plane to walk about to relieve his chronic back pain and press the flesh with other passengers. I don’t think you’d ever see Hillary, Pelosi, or many others of the “ruling class” being true to their convictions in that manner.
Scott,
Let alone Shrillary, Pelosi, et al, flying in coach! The horror! Flying back with the peasants.
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Boss, There probably wouldn’t be any room for the other passengers in coach with all the little bottles of booze they and their crew would strew around.
To understand the career of Paul Wellstone, you have to understand the 1978 election, otherwise known as The Minnesota Massacre. In that year, the Republicans, who were supposed to be a defeated and disgraced political force, took the governor’s mansion, a majority in the state house and both US Senate seats (one was a special election for the seat vacated by Walter Mondale).
It was devastating.
That year, I attended a county rubber chicken diner and speaker after speaker stood up to say that the party had drifted too far left. These were farmers and union guys who had been pushed aside by the anti-war, socialist wing of the party – and the party listened to them for about twenty minutes.
Then a young professor from Carleton College trotted to the microphone and delivered a bible-thumping, old time progressive religion speech about “going forward” instead of “back”. His definition of forward was hard left.
That pretty much says everything that needs to be said about who he was and who the party is.
The farmers and the union guys walked out….and are still walking.