If you are looking for that old time political religion, you will be disappointed. Wellstone’s liberalism is political unitarianism, as mild and inoffensive as Unitarianism itself, which has been defined as the belief that there is at most one God. Or (to change metaphors) if it is political red meat you are after, more disappointment awaits. You have entered a political salad bar.
A Democratic colleague jocularly greets Wellstone in the Senate chamber as ““the last liberal in America.’’ Surely Senator Kennedy demurs. However, Wellstone looks the part of the professor in politics, which he is. He taught political science at Carleton College. He is the most rumpled senator, and in a dark blue shirt and flowered necktie he looks like the Sixties settled into tenure. In 1996 he won a second term and was the only senator running for re-election who had the kidney to vote the way a number of others felt–against the welfare-reform bill.
That vote was not as risky or otherworldly as it might have seemed, Minnesota being what it is. But what is Minnesota? Liberalism’s last redoubt? It does have a long liberal tradition rep- resented by Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Orville Freeman and even Republican Harold Stassen. Yet today it has one of the most conservative senators (freshman Rod Grams, Americans for Democratic Action rating: 0) as well as Wellstone (ADA rating: 100). Still, in the era when Republicans were winning five of six presidential elections (1968-1988), Minnesota was the most Democratic state, voting Democratic five of six times. And in 1990 it elected Wellstone, who two years earlier had been state chairman of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign.
Asked if, 10 years ago, he could have imagined a Democratic president like Clinton–one signing repeal of the 60-year-old federal entitlement to support for the poor; fixated on balancing the budget; proposing to do so by cutting discretionary domestic spending by one third–Wellstone answers softly and monosyllabically: ““No.’’ He says he subscribed to Arthur Schlesinger’s cyclical theory of American politics and expected the 1990s to see resurgent government activism. But when he is asked what thunderous change would result if Wellstonism swept the nation, his answer sounds . . . Clintonian.
He recalls, as a kind of epiphany, a town meeting he held in a small Minnesota community where about 150 people braved a frigid winter night to say essentially this: ““Give us some capital to work with and get out of the way.’’ He says, ““Too many of their experiences with government have been unpleasant’’ because government is ““overcentralized and bureaucratized.''
Good grief. You come hungering for high-octane liberalism and get served warmed-over Reaganism. How about revving up the government as an egalitarian engine of economic redistribution, causing fear and trembling among economic royalists? He does say that the distribution of wealth is becoming increasingly ““lopsided.’’ However, that may not be true. John C. Weicher of the Hudson Institute, writing in The Public Interest quarterly, argues that wealth–the stock of assets that people own–as distinct from income has been growing rapidly but the concentration of it has changed little: ““Overall, as a society, we have been getting richer, rich and poor alike, more or less evenly.''
Anyway, Wellstone only tentatively proposes an ameliorative program: ““I would not preclude restoring some progressivity to the income tax.’’ ““Not preclude’’? ““Some’’? By way of extenuation for such tepidness, he says, ““There is an old Yiddish proverb: “You can’t dance at two weddings at the same time’.’’ He means that if balancing the budget is the goal, a bigger agenda must wait.
But his agenda has almost nothing to do with the left’s traditional big agenda of using the power of the state to increase equality of condition, of outcomes. Rather, his agenda falls squarely within the traditional American and conservative emphasis on equality of opportunity. The pursuit of that can involve energetic government, but he does not really call for much energy.
His interests are in schools, and especially in early-childhood development. However, he knows the severely limited relevance of the federal government, which provides only about 7 percent of all the money spent on education at all levels. Besides, he also knows the limited salience of money. The best predictor of schools’ performances is the quality of the families from which the children come to school–the number of parents in the home, quantity and quality of reading matter in the home, amount of homework done in the home, amount of television watched in the home. There is precious little that government at any level can do to vary those variables.
He envisions ““giant bookmobiles with mentors’’ and ““read-athons in union halls’’ and ““math-athons in veterans’ halls’’ and a program to get discarded computers to the poor, and his is surely the only Senate office where the name John Dewey is heard. Six years from now, Dewey will have no reverberation in the Senate because Wellstone is pledged to serve only two terms. Which means that in 2000 he will be two years from retirement and perhaps receptive to the idea that some of his fans entertain–a Wellstone presidential campaign to give true liberals a nourishing, stick-to-the-ribs alternative to Clintonist, New Democrat, centrist mush. Wellstone’s current disavowal–““That’s not the plan right now’’–is less than Shermanesque.
But what would be emblazoned on the unfurled banner of True Liberalism? ““A bookmobile on every block’’? As a summons to the barricades, that needs work.
