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Paul Wellstone Forgotten
By Doug Patton
November 4, 2002

"What we were witnessing there was the far left practicing their religion."
- House Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Texas) commenting on the Minnesota Democrat Party rally masquerading as a memorial service for the late Paul Wellstone

Go back precisely two years, to the 2000 election. Imagine that it is Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Missouri) instead of his opponent, Mel Carnahan, who has died in a plane crash. Imagine further that Ashcroft's wife, Janet, their daughter, Martha, a pair of senate staffers and two pilots have just perished as well.

It is Friday morning, ten days before the election. Before the bodies can even be retrieved from the crash site, Missouri Republicans announce their intention to put former Sen. John Danforth on the ballot to replace Sen. Ashcroft. They tell Democrats who dare to criticize the move that they are "crass" and "partisan." How dare they practice politics while the man's family is still grieving and has not even had a chance to bury him.

The family sends a message to the White House telling Vice President Al Gore to stay away from a planned memorial service. When Danforth and former President George H. W. Bush walk into the service, held in Kemper Arena in Kansas City, they are cheered and given a standing ovation. Cameras show them laughing together, shaking hands and slapping each other on the back.

Some in attendance are stunned at the pep rally atmosphere that pervades the hall. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), who has come simply to pay his respects to a fallen colleague, is booed by the crowd.

Sen. Ashcroft's sons, Andy and Jay, take to the podium and tell the crowd how committed their father was to the agenda he had sought in the United States Senate. They decry tax-and-spend liberalism and call for an end to abortion, homosexual special rights and the U.S. Department of Education.

Speaker after speaker shrieks that "for John's sake, we must hold onto power!" One even suggests that it is the duty of Democrat candidates running for office to suspend all campaign activities for a week in memory of Ashcroft's ideals.

Singers revere the names of Republican heroes and those who have championed conservative causes over the years. C-Span covers the three-and-a-half-hour event, as do statewide Missouri television stations.

Can you imagine? No, and neither can I.

Had such a thing happened, the national media would have been all over the story, reporting on the unseemly manner in which the right had hijacked a memorial service and turned it into a 3-hour political rally for conservative causes. And they would have been right.

What happened in Minneapolis one week before the election was a travesty. I cannot recall a more appalling example of crass political partisanship at such an inappropriate time. Rather than coming together to remember Paul Wellstone, radical Democrats simply gathered in his name to cheer Bill Clinton and Walter Mondale, to boo Republicans and to worship at the altar of raw political power.

I have never been a fan of Minnesota's oddball governor, Jesse Ventura, but I admired him enormously when he and his wife (who seemed to be genuinely grieving) got up and walked out in disgust. The next day, he said that he felt "used by the Democrats" in their disgusting display of partisanship. Ventura told reporters he intends to appoint an average Minnesotan - perhaps a garbage hauler or other blue-collar worker - but that the appointment decidedly will not go to a Democrat.

By the weekend, even DNC Chairman Terry McCauliff was trying to do damage control by spinning an apology for the rank partisanship and rude nature of the rally, but it was too little too late. That crowd on Tuesday was celebrating power, pure and simple, not the memory of Paul Wellstone, and we can only hope that their hateful excess gave America pause.

But then, what did we expect from the people who booed the Boy Scouts at their National Convention two years ago?