The board of “Wellstone Action” has voted the sons of the late Senator off its board; the Wellstones had too much affinity…
…for rural white deplorables who forsook the Democrat party.
And like all apostates, they get no love from the Big Left:
Founded after Wellstone’s death in a plane crash in 2002, Wellstone Action has trained thousands of progressive candidates, campaign operatives and community organizers throughout the country, with alumni serving in local and state offices and in the U.S. House. In 2016, the last year for which tax filings are available, the group reported providing training to 2,135 data and digital strategists, 723 nonprofit leaders and community organizers, and 854 aspiring political leaders.
David Wellstone and other Democrats close to his father began objecting last year to what David Wellstone described as Wellstone Action’s abandonment of disaffected Democrats in the rural Midwest — the rural poor were an early focus of the late senator — with an increasingly narrow focus on gender politics and people of color.
“I said, ‘After Trump, we’ve got to figure out how we are going to go back after those Democrats that we lost,” David Wellstone said. “We can do all the stuff we do. We do great stuff on communities of color; we’re doing great stuff on gender identity politics. But we need to do some of these other trainings. … Nobody wanted to have a discussion about that.”
To all my Democrat friends – I say “this is the way true progressives should approach the world”.
They make it too easy, as someone pointed out in a article I saw on RCP earlier this week the Midwest is turning into the South for Democrats. Im not sure they can ever win the White House again the way they are going. The electoral math isnt adding up, especially with NY and CA losing 3-5 votes every 10 years
Memories fade, of course, but I still picture Paul Wellstone as a pretty principled liberal. There were some maddening things that he did in his role as gadfly, but he seemed pretty connected to people, and not as “processed” as the candidates being groomed and touted by his party. That his sons follow his concerns/instincts is actually rather heartening. Of course, that means they must go to the “new” DFL (which you’ve already noted has disenfranchised the F and L in its name). The battle started at the funeral.
I remember one thing Wellstone said that resonated with me; that as a Democrat, he understood that corporations do not pay taxes. Their customers do. Pretty smart for a leftist, he was.
And this debacle really illustrates the hazards of the estate tax, IMO. Rich people put their money into foundations theoretically to shield it from the grubby paws of the government, only to find a few years later that they money they’d worked so hard to earn is now in the grubby paws of people who hate everything they did. Time to end this charade by ending the estate tax and let money earned by people who work hard stay in the hands of the children they trained to do the same.
I’ve disclosed this before, but I re-wired that green bus in ’91. It was kept at my neighbor, Len Yotter’s farm, and Len asked me to do it.
I didn’t know who Wellstone was, but I knew he was a stinking leftist. I agreed because in all my travels, Len was the ONLY leftist that walked the talk. He would literally give you the shirt off his back. He was a good guy.
Anyway, I witnessed Wellstone berating the (volunteer) driver once, and asked Len if he was always such a little prick…Len said “never in public”.
I told Len I’d like to rig an air cannon on the back deck so the little fuck could blow food stamps out to the crowd…He thought that was pretty funny, but didn’t think Wellstone would get it.
Swiftee, I assume those stories are true and even if they aren’t I chuckled a whole lot. It’s ironic that Wellstone would actually be “a little prick” because not being so was his main calling card.
Very good.