Rybak Remembers Paul and Sheila Wellstone.
(Published in the Star Tribune Oct. 27, 2002)
Paul Wellstone never forgot what it was like to be an outsider, even after eight years in the world's most exclusive club.
He made that point to me at the beginning of my campaign, in the center of the ballroom at an annual DFL fundraiser. I was a long-shot rookie candidate uncomfortably making my way through a room of better-known, better-connected party members. But the ice was broken when Wellstone threw his arms around me in a public show few could miss and said, "You just keep fighting. Tell the truth and good things will happen."
For a political newcomer who saw Wellstone as the hero whose grassroots campaign was my model, these words of encouragement meant everything. They meant even more because I knew Paul and Sheila Wellstone had given that encouragement to hundreds of others -- activists more than insiders, the workers in the kitchen more than the people in the ballroom.
They helped people find the strength inside themselves to become more than they thought they could be. So it was fitting that when Paul's body began to fail his tremendous spirit filled the void.
Last May, Wellstone, Roger Moe and I were campaigning at the May Day Parade near Powderhorn Park. Sheila would later confide that it was hard for Paul to see Roger and me run through the crowd while he slowly made his way through what must have been a painful hike. But by the time we reached the park, Paul's fists were pumping and once again he had wrapped a cheering crowd in his politics of joy.
Sometimes the bond he had with a crowd filled him just a little past the brim. Backstage at last month's Human Rights Campaign Fund Dinner, he promised the rest of us skeptics: "I'll only talk for a minute or two." A good 10 minutes later, his arms in motion, he brought the crowd to its feet with a grand finale: "And we will win this race!" Finally finished, he left the podium -- only to turn back around to say one more time, "And we will win this race!"
Sometimes all you could do was laugh, but behind his infectious politics of joy was a deeply serious intent that never wavered. Paul and Sheila measured themselves by how they served those without means and access. In a decade when power and money concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, Paul stood his increasingly solitary ground. That says a lot about Paul Wellstone, but it also speaks to the mission both Wellstones would want us to carry on for them.
Paul and Sheila Wellstone were heroes and mentors and friends, but we can't do them justice if we simply mourn this indescribable tragedy. We owe it to them to follow their example: Keep fighting, tell the truth and good things will happen.
-- R.T. Rybak is the mayor of Minneapolis.
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