My son Matt, who is a freshman at Carleton College, called me early last Friday afternoon to tell me that he’d just heard that Paul Wellstone had been killed in a plane crash. He’d got the news right after getting out of his freshman political science class, the same class I’d taken at Carleton 32 years ago from Paul Wellstone.
By then I’d been at Carleton for two terms and had encountered, I thought, all the typical types of college teacher. The calculus teacher had a beard and wore a peace medallion over his turtleneck and smoked dope with students. The Latin teacher was 70 years old and chain smoked Pall Malls while quizzing you on Virgil’s grammar. The English teacher lost his collection of tweed jackets and Hemingway when his house went up in smoke.
Wellstone breathed fire.
He was the first teacher who reminded me of me—short stature, long hair, loud voice. Like me, he wore t-shirts and jeans to class and seemed to pay scant attention to the reading list he’d assigned, except that he had an amazing command of facts that he used to support his lectures, which actually were more like speeches. His brilliance was manifest. He was a first year teacher, so he couldn’t have memorized his lectures, but he spoke without notes for an hour. He wasn’t constrained by a podium, but he was predictable. Every lecture he’d start with his fingers jammed into his jeans with the thumbs hooked over the edge of the pocket, as if he were trying to restrain himself from what he must have known was coming–the inevitable rising volume, quickening cadence, and karate chopping of knowledge into our small freshman brains.
Sometimes you’d come out of class feeling as if you’d been assaulted by an intellect and energy so far superior to yours that you’d never measure up. But more often, you felt smarter for having spent an hour with him. That was his power, and he used it to great effect on people who had yet to fully develop their own critical abilities.
Wellstone didn’t fit the Carleton mode. Then, Carleton was the ivory tower, and the presumption was that most of what you’d ever have to know could be learned within the confines of campus. Students were not permitted to have cars. All students lived in the dorms. And the work load was so ferocious and academic standards so high that every moment spent other than in class or the library was regarded as lost. Carleton’s stature among the best liberal arts colleges seemed a justification of its insular attitudes. Whenever we had a large snowfall, I imagined the college news bureau coming up with a press release headline: “Highway 19 Closed, World Cut Off.”
Wellstone wasn’t of such scholarly demeanor. In 1974, he was given a negative evaluation by his department and was on the verge of being fired. The then president openly wanted to be rid of him, as did most of his colleagues. (To their credit, many Carleton profs admitted this even after last Friday.) But students and recent alumni, who’d obviously picked up something about the power of politics in his classes, organized in his defense, as did some sympathetic colleagues. The college eventually agreed to an evaluation of his work by scholars not connected with Carleton. This evaluation was overwhelmingly positive, and the decision was reversed. He was actually granted tenure a year ahead of the normal cycle.
Carleton was an early power base for him. A liberal arts college in a liberal state is a Petri dish for growing lefties, and he knew it. From Carleton, he started organizing in Rice County, moved from there to the western Minnesota power line controversy, to the nomination for state auditor and to the Senate. His cadre was young, very smart, and mesmerized by his power to harangue. Wellstone never taught, by example anyway, that it was sometimes more effective to shut up. (Rick Kahn, a former student who spoke at his memorial service, unfortunately didn’t pick up that lesson from anyone else either.)
Wellstone’s attractiveness lay not just in his oratorical skills, though, but in his liberal message itself, repeated endlessly. His true believers never flagged.
But to others, the diatribe became tiresome, and we lost interest. It’s hard to tell whether it was from pure repetition or because of the seeming change in Wellstone from outsider to insider, best typified by the change in his advertising strategy from the distinctive wit and message of 1990 to the same monotonous doggerel broadcast by every other Candidate X ad infinitum. As his erstwhile ad man said last month in The Rake, “He drank the Kool-Aid.” Hell, if you believe what you hear from those who spend too much time on counterpunch.com, our interest waned because Wellstone wasn’t radical enough.
I went to a Democratic fundraiser with Al Gore last month. The main topic of the evening was why Democrats were losing ground every election. Gore, one would think, should have more insight into that question than any man alive. A brilliant man with the right ideas, who so muddled his message during the campaign that he couldn’t even carry his own state, somehow didn’t offer me any answers. Congressional candidate Janet Robert made it all clear to me though. She chimed in that she was in such a close race she had to support Bush’s Iraq policy so she could get elected.
Since I also have never learned the lesson of shutting up, I asked “Why then should Democrats vote for you if you’re just going to act like a Republican? Any first year marketing student could tell you that you have to draw a clear distinction between your product and that of your competitor. Do you think they sell Aquafresh toothpaste by telling you it’s just like Colgate, only a little bit tastier?” There was a brief lull in the din, which in a room full of Democrats, is about all you can hope for.
Wellstone wasn’t there that night, but he gave us his answer the next week by voting against granting Bush dictatorial war powers. He was the only candidate in a close race to do so. He certainly didn’t do it for marketing reasons, because, if anything should be clear to us, it’s that Wellstone knew nothing about marketing. What he did know was what was right. Oddly, that was his market advantage, and his polls immediately trended up. I wonder if he even knew why.
That’s the last lesson the professor got through to me–that despite the prevailing political wisdom, the people will ultimately know the genuine man not by what he says, no matter how loud and often he says it, but by what he does. The rest is silence.
Photo courtesy of Carleton College