United States Senator Paul Wellstone, who died last Friday in a plane crash in the middle of a tough re-election campaign, was a leading champion of liberal causes in the "happy warrior" tradition of Minnesota Democratic politics.
In keeping with his maverick politics, the 58-year-old former political science professor and community organiser was a lonely dissenter in one of the last votes he cast in Congress before going home to campaign. He was the only senator facing a tough re-election fight to vote against empowering President Bush to use military force against Iraq. To have done otherwise, he said, would have violated the principles that guided his career. His seat in Minnesota is crucial to the Democrats majority of only one in the Senate and his place on the ballot paper has now been taken by former vice-president Walter Mondale.
In his 12 years in the Senate, Wellstone, often described as one of Congress's last unabashed liberals, rejected the notion that government had grown too big. He stood as a rarely wavering advocate of its use to help ordinary people, especially the poor.
"Paul Wellstone was the soul of the Senate," Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle said. "He was one of the most noble and courageous men I have ever known."
"He was always willing to stand up for the little guy, even if it meant taking on the political goliaths," Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said.
Even in his own party, Wellstone was often in the minority, sometimes a lone dissenter. He made long speeches - too long in the view of some colleagues. But his speeches, frequently delivered after most senators had gone home, nearly always conveyed a personal passion and sense of commitment that stood out from the scripted rhetoric so common in Congress.
His causes were legion: universal health care, more federal spending for education, safeguards for human and civil rights, ethics in government, worker protections and better mental health care. He cast one of the few Senate votes against the 1996 Clinton welfare reform law, which trimmed benefits, and voted in 1991 against authorising the Persian Gulf War.
Wellstone was the antithesis of a grim-faced ideologue. Quick to laugh and joke, he took his causes seriously but not himself. He was widely liked and admired for his principled positions, even by his political foes.
Paul David Wellstone grew up as a second-generation American in a politically active and intellectually engaged household in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. His father, Russian-born Leon Wexelstein, changed the family name to Wellstone at a time of rising anti-Semitism in the 1930s. The older man spoke 10 languages, worked for the federal government and exposed his son to a wide range of scholarly pursuits.
His New York-born mother, Minnie, was the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants. She worked in the cafeteria of his junior high school and helped push for desegregation of Arlington schools in the early 1960s.
Wellstone attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned a PhD in political science while participating in a variety of causes that would later mark his political career.Wiry, short and full of energy, he took up wrestling and became a champion.
In 1963, at 19, he married his childhood sweetheart, Sheila Ison, from a Kentucky coal-mining family. After receiving his doctorate, Wellstone went to Minnesota, where he became a political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield in 1969. He was active in the liberal causes of the day and was almost fired for being too focused on his activist pursuits. He was arrested while picketing a bank that had foreclosed on farmers.
He ran unsuccessfully for state auditor and managed Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign in Minnesota. In 1990 he challenged Senator Rudy Boschwitz, dashing around the state in an old, green school bus (which he recycled for his campaign this year) and ran quirky ads that mocked Boschwitz's fat campaign coffers. He speed-talked through his spiel, saying, "I don't have $6 million, so I have to talk fast."
Political experts scoffed but voters loved it. Wellstone pulled off the year's only upset, winning by 2 percentage points. Six years later he won again by a comfortable margin.
In 1997, Wellstone organised a poverty tour reminiscent of a trip taken by Robert F. Kennedy 30 years earlier, and the next year he signalled his intention to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, saying that he represented "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party". But in early 1999, he said his back couldn't withstand the rigours of a presidential campaign and dropped out. Breaking with the pack in Congress, he backed former senator Bill Bradley's bid to wrest the nomination from Vice-President Al Gore.
Shortly after his death, Wellstone's campaign sent out an e-mail with the text of an ad he was about to run in his re-election campaign. In the ad, Wellstone said: "I don't represent the big oil companies. I don't represent the big pharmaceutical companies. I don't represent the Enrons of this world. But you know what? They already have great representation in Washington. It's the rest of the people that need it. I represent the people of Minnesota." Wellstone is survived by two sons, David and Mark, and six grandchildren.
Paul Wellstone: born July 21, 1944; died October 26th 2002.