(Guest post by George Erickson)

Morning. The sun, shuttered by clouds that brush my Ely Lake treetops, is just a feeble glow. Were it not for the intervening Norway pines, I could see the Eveleth/Virginia airport, and a mile beyond that, my gaze would stop at a roadside memorial to a caring, progressive, Minnesota activist who ranked among the best.

On a day like this, when Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and his wife Sheila were en route to the funeral of a friend in a chartered Beechcraft King Air, their lives took a tragic turn. Descending too low, and more than a mile off course, the Beech struck the trees, and we suddenly had a vastly different funeral to consider—a service to honor Senator Wellstone, his wife, and child plus several coworkers and two instrument-rated pilots who died in that inexplicable crash.

I retrieve a book from the table beside my deck chair, and as the wind sighs I turn the first page of a book that every American should read: Wellstone’s The Consience of the Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda.

The title says it all, for Wellstone was a truly compassionate man: “How can we live in the richest, most privileged country in the world… and still hear from Republicans and too many Democrats that we cannot afford to provide a good education for every child, that we cannot afford to provide health security for all our citizens?”

He was always that way. As a fledgling Carleton college professor who was determined to organize the poor, Wellstone was warned by the college trustees that he’d be fired if he continued his activist ways. He persisted—and was fired.

Fortunately, 1600 of the college’s 1700 students rose to Wellstone’s defense. Reinstated, he became the Carlton’s youngest tenured professor, and soon turned to politics as a way to improve the lives of John and Jane Doe. “Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives,” he said, “lessening human suffering, advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and in the world.” Thomas Paine, the first great American humanist comes to mind.

With his green bus, he traveled aroung Minnesota, won the Democratic nomination, and campaigned against wealthy Rudy Boschwitz, the incumbent senator who eventually sunk his faltering campaign with a desperate, bigoted charge that Wellstone was insufficiently Jewish because he’d married a Christian.

During his years in the U.S. Senate, Wellstone, who came to be known as “the conscience of the Senate,” championed women’s rights, promoted single-payer healthcare, and campaign finance reform. He was re-elected despite a vicious campaign that relied on a Newt Gingrich strategy to always use derogatory adjectives when speaking of your opponent. Thus, Paul faced ads that said “Wellstone is a lying, hypocritical whiner” but rarely addressed the issues. He was labeled “Senator Welfare,” and was charged with wanting to take everyone’s guns away, and with supporting abortion at nine months for the purpose of sex selection. In an attempt to make liberalism sound like a crime, he was called “embarrassingly liberal.” (Nevermind that liberalism is defined as “favorable to progress or reform, favorable to freedom of action and thought, free from prejudice, open to tolerance and generosity.”)

Despite frequent death threats, Wellstone persevered, serving the ordinary man and woman—not the corporations and not the rich and famous. He had been targeted by Republicans as the # 1 person to be removed from the Senate. Undeterred he soldiered on, and on October 25, 2002, just two weeks after he voted against George W. Bush’s fraudulent war in Iraq, his Beechcraft fell from the skies.

Though just five foot five inches tall, Paul Wellstone took on bigger, more powerful, and often unprincipled foes, winning some battles and losing others, but in eschewing power, fame, and profit, and in representing John and Jane Doe so faithfully, Paul Wellstone repeatedly proved that he was the a superb human being.