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Paul Wellstone, Pet LiberalWhy conservatives will miss the late Minnesota senator.

By Timothy NoahPosted Monday, Oct. 28, 2002, at 7:00 PM ET

Everyone was saddened to learn last week that Sen. Paul Wellstone had died in a plane crash, but the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page was sadder than anyone else. Almost immediately, Peggy Noonan posted a Wellstone appreciation ("A Good Guy Dies an Untimely Death") on its Web site. On Oct. 28, the Journal editpage eulogized Wellstone twice more, in an editorial headlined "A Conviction Politician" and in an op-ed by Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes titled "Paul Wellstone: Not a Faker, Just Plain Honest."

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Amazingly, fewer memorial tributes to Wellstone can be found on the Web sites for The Nation (two), the Progressive (one), and In These Times (none), all magazines whose politics are closely aligned with Wellstone's, than on the Journal's editpage, whose politics are completely antithetical. Among the major left-liberal national print organs, only Mother Jones has produced as many Wellstone tributes as the Journal editpage. (Caveat: This is as of Oct. 28, 3 p.m. Pacific Time. Chatterbox is not counting reprints on all three magazine Web sites of pieces by and interviews with Wellstone himself. Also, Chatterbox is counting neither a David Corn column in The Nation that strings together quotes from Wellstone's book, The Conscience of a Liberal, nor the brief intro to a reprinted In These Times article by Wellstone. Chatterbox did count a John Nichols tribute to Wellstone's wife Sheila, who also died in the plane crash, in The Nation.)

Chatterbox does not mean to suggest that the left admired Wellstone any less than did the right. Quite the opposite: The left surely admired Wellstone much more than did the right. So why is it displaying its grief less?

Let's dispense first with two non-Machiavellian reasons. One is that Wellstone was a genuinely admirable man, and decency compelled those he'd done political battle with to make a point of saying so. (From the Journal editorial: "Mr. Wellstone's principles weren't ours, but we admired him because he rarely hid them." Robert Novak said much the same thing in an Oct. 28 column.) Paying tribute to a deceased political adversary is like shaking hands with the opposing team after a ball game; it's good sportsmanship. It's different with a deceased political ally. Just as there's no moral imperative to shake your teammate's hand after a ball game, there's no moral imperative to pay tribute to a comrade-in-arms after he passes on, though of course it's always nice when you do.

Another non-Machiavellian reason the right is grieving more conspicuously than the left is that, among journalists paid to spout opinions in newspaper columns and on cable TV, conservatives outnumber liberals. Left-of-center opinion journalists who grieve for Wellstone have less access to the mass market than right-of-center opinion journalists who grieve for Wellstone. (Chatterbox is not including in this calculus straight-news reporters and journalists who belong to what conservatives scornfully label the "cultural elite," i.e., those who write for small-circulation, quasi-academic publications. Liberals still outnumber conservatives there.)

But let's consider a more calculating reason for the right to rend garments over Paul Wellstone. He was more useful to the right than he was to the left. That's because he made liberals seem further to the left than they really were. Wellstone himself stood to the left of everyone else in the U.S. Senate. But when conservatives wrote or talked about him, they usually characterized him not as a left-liberal, but simply as a liberal. In his Journal piece, Fred Barnes wrote that whenever Wellstone appeared on his CNN program, The Beltway Boys, "I introduced him as our favorite liberal." The Journal editorial stated, "He was an honest liberal." Noonan's Web piece for the Journal quoted with approval CNN's Candy Crowley describing Wellstone as a "pure liberal." A common theme in all these pieces was that Paul Wellstone's beliefs were just like every other liberal politician's; he just happened to be more honest about what those beliefs were and more uncompromising in living by them. Here's Noonan:

[H]is liberalism wasn't a jacket he put on in the morning to fool the rubes and powers—he meant it. He seemed to be a politician who was not a cynic, who was not poll driven, who was not in it just for the enjoyments of power. He operated from belief.

By contrast, runs this theme, your run-of-the-mill liberal doesn't want voters to know just how much of a crypto-socialist he really is. Here's Barnes:

He occasionally called himself a "progressive" but never a "new Democrat" or "moderate." Nor did he insist, as many liberals do, that political labels mean nothing. He was not a faker.

Chatterbox disagrees with none of this praise for Wellstone. But can't a "new Democrat" or "neoliberal" be just as true to his beliefs as Wellstone was to his? Are they all really just mountebanks and blow-dried weathervanes? Or is it possible, just possible, that some of them have arrived at their centrist views on the merits, after observing the experience of three decades during which certain core leftist beliefs were tested, and some found wanting?

Conservatives grieve Paul Wellstone because there is little or no chance that anyone as far to the left as Wellstone will be elected to the Senate anytime soon. Since the start of the Clinton administration, the main Republican project has been to maintain the fiction that an overwhelmingly centrist Democratic Party lies to the left of the American mainstream. Without Wellstone, that point will be a little harder to argue.

[Correction, Oct. 30: Fred Barnes' show, The Beltway Boys, is on Fox News, not CNN.]

[Update, Oct. 30: The Nation has now added many more Wellstone remembrances to its Web site. To read them, click here, here, and here.]

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

Reaction to Noah's Machiavellian theory of Republican eulogy finds a wide spectrum of Wellstone admirers who feel that conservative admiration is sincere. And while others are busy formulating theories for Democratic taciturnity (fear of Wellstone's powerful liberalism) or Republican volubility, several have given us excellent one liners.

Remarks From The Fray:

The WSJ editorial is more pointed in the "honest liberal" backhanded compliment. But Noah seems to miss the point of that. It is not intended to imply that other liberals are dishonest (though it's a great two-fer, if a liberal wants to take it as such). Instead, it is inteded to lay the groundwork for skewering the Democrat (Fritz Mondale, according to reports) who replaces Wellstone in the campaign. That Democrat will have two choices:

1. Mouth the positions of Wellstone to satisfy the late senator's base.

or

2. Declare his/her own positions, possibly pushing down voter turnout (as might happen if, say, a Jesse Helms-style Republican stepped in for a Chris Shays-style Republican).

Why shouldn't the conservative editorial page of record make that conflict obvious?

--dquinn

(To reply, click here.)

Noah, perhaps the silence from the left is in direct proportion to the centrist shame of knowing that those issues that had value to Paul have value. The fusing of the political parties has some penalties. Why are those in the Republican party speaking out? Because they can with no sacrifice of dignity. The opposite may be true where Democrats who no longer want to say the words "affirmative action" in public are concerned.

-- marylb

(To reply, click here.)

The right appreciated him for two reasons. Paul Wellstone was likeable and more importantly, he could be trusted to adhere to a political principal rather than modify his politics depending on which way the wind blew and what stance was desired by his party leadership because it could be spun into partisan advantage. (It's called integrity.)

The second is a rare quality in Washington, and admirable besides. Neither party possesses this quality in anything like an abundance.

But they recognize the real thing when they see it, and they admire it. They just don't have it.

-- Deodand

(To reply, click here.)

It is silly to think that conservatives will actually miss Wellstone's presence in the Senate. But his death does provide the opportunity to dwell on some of his positive personal qualities, qualities that the right tends to value more than the left.

Krauthammer once had a column about how conservatives view liberals as idiots, while liberals think conservative are evil. Wellstone was a rare liberal who could deal with conservatives as fellow Americans rather than as crypto-fascists and members of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

-- Peter Kauffner

(To reply, click here.)

What had occurred to me first as I processed those eulogies (thinking more of the smarmier set like Orrin Hatch) I found myself thinking that these eulogies weren't meant so much for now as for future reference as they clutch back at them as testimony to how *they* are the bipartisan, cross-the-aisle appreciators ("See? I'm the one who was praising Paul Wellstone.") all the more to try perpetuating their disingenuous indictment of the Senate Democrats as the obstructionists who allegedly won't work across party lines.

Secondly, the entire focus of praise for Wellstone coming from the right (and even noted from the left, which seems more genuine only cuz it isn't self-serving) is to point to Wellstone for his sincerity and principled stands. It serves Republicans to suggest by implication that every other Democrat is unprincipled … If Republicans hadn't spent a hypocritical decade launching diatribes against Dems as being phony or unprincipled, their effusive praise for Paul Wellstone's adherence to principle wouldn't seem like their own phoniness finding new opportunistic ways of cloaking itself. I don't doubt that there's an element of truth in their recognition of genuine principle when they see it, especially since it stood out so prominently from other Senators right and left with the exception of Feingold, the one and only other Senator willing to go against the flow on principle without fail. Others I'm sure vote on principle but their 'principle' is somehow always "easier" and therefore less provably principled and certainly no 'badge of courage'. But Wellstone and Feingold stand apart as frequently wearers of a badge of courage of conviction, which is one step beyond conviction itself. I think if anything -- on the non-Machiavellian side -- they were in awe of the badge of courage side of it, but when they focus on the conviction side of it itself, making Paul seem to be the lone Democrat of conviction, then I think they actually dishonor Paul because they refuse to see that the beliefs of his party as a whole also represent genuine conviction, even if he was unique in his 100% track record adhering to them.

-- Carolyn

(To reply, click here.)

New Democrats believe that there are magic words, and if they can just first discover the magic words people want to hear, and say them, they can be elected to positions that attract lots of suck-ups, oh-boy.

In that, they are exactly like the liberal wing of the Republican party.

But not the conservative wing of the Republican party, which believes that conservatives have a natural right to be elected to positions that attract lots of suck-ups, and that fact that they may not be is purely the result of error or an evil conspiracy by the liberals.

-- Caliban Weeps

(To reply, click here.)

Yes, and I miss Newt for the same reason. Fortunately, there is still Ari Fleischer.

-- Jack D

(To reply, click here.)

"Since the start of the Clinton administration, the main Republican project has been to maintain the fiction that an overwhelmingly centrist Democratic Party lies to the left of the American mainstream. Without Wellstone, that point will be a little harder to argue."

No, Chatterbox, it will be just as easy for them to do that. They'll just invoke Paul Wellstone's name, and preface it with "the late".

-- Beverly Mann

(To reply, click here.)

(10/29)

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