Beyond Paul Wellstone's death being a tragedy, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that as a "true liberal," Wellstone was a member of a dying breed (for GOP purposes this endangered species will of course include Walter Mondale in the next few days). But this casting only proves how dramatically the terms of debate in American politics have shifted to the right.

The interesting thing is that the postmortems on Wellstone's liberalism almost never mention actual policy issues that supposedly placed him beyond the pale, apart from his two votes against war in Iraq. So let's look at what Wellstone actually stood for when he died:

• Health care. Wellstone thought it was wrong that 41 million Americans were uninsured. He believed they should be guaranteed a benefit package equal to that enjoyed by members of Congress. I defy any conservative in Congress to explain why this notion is "outside the mainstream."

• Wages. Wellstone believed it was wrong that the federal minimum wage, at $5.15 an hour, was worth less now, adjusted for inflation, than it was in the 1970s. He thought full-time work should enable a decent life. Polls show that most Americans agree.

• Welfare. Yes, Wellstone voted against 1996's welfare reform. But so did Bob Kerrey, nobody's idea of a "true liberal." Kerrey voted against it because he thought ending a $15 billion a year subsistence entitlement for (at the time) 4 million poor adults and their 10 million blameless children -- while leaving untouched several hundred billion a year in entitlements for Americans earning more than $50,000 a year -- was immoral. "We don't spend too much on the poor," Kerrey told me this week. "We spend too little. Then and now." What a pinko! Well, at least Kerrey wants Saddam's head.

• Education. Wellstone fought for well-funded after-school programs, which Arnold Schwarzenegger is championing via a ballot measure in California, and smart people think it may get Arnold the GOP nod for governor in four years. Wellstone opposed the "Leave No Child Behind" hoax because it was full of make-believe fixes -- such as a decree that states have a qualified teacher in every classroom, without any money to help poor districts actually achieve that goal. Opposing such "unfunded mandates" is usually a conservative fetish. My bet is that within six months governors of both parties will persuade Washington to waive many of these requirements as impractical, validating Wellstone's view of the bill as a politically inspired charade.

Wellstone thought it was wrong that the Head Start preschool program serves only half of eligible children, that Pell grants for disadvantaged college students are worth less than they were two decades ago even as tuitions have soared, and that crumbling schools need $100 billion in repairs. He therefore thought it sensible to put off further tax cuts for people who earn more than $300,000 to address this. If that's "too liberal," then why are conservatives afraid to defend the merits of their tax cut for the top vs. Wellstone's uses for the same money -- and desperate to frame the debate instead through their generic "They're tax hikers!" demagoguery?

There's more, but you get the point. Paul Wellstone wasn't "embarrassingly liberal," as the attacks against him charged. It's that the rest of country has become "shamefully conservative," or, perhaps more accurately, "unthinkingly conservative," and the vital task is to understand why. Daniel Patrick Moynihan quips that no Democrat today would stand behind Richard Nixon's proposals for universal health coverage and a guaranteed minimum income for poor workers. Too liberal. What happened?

The right's great strategic achievement in the last 25 years -- from the aggressive conservative think tanks to Newt Gingrich's artful demagoguery on "Clintoncare" to the "compassionate conservative" hoax now on display -- has been to confuse the press and the public about how reasonable goals like Paul Wellstone's actually are. Wellstone wrote last year that he felt he was playing defense 80 percent of the time in the Senate. Given how mainstream most of his ideas were in the minds of real people, Democrats can best honor Wellstone's memory by finally becoming strategic themselves about how to play offense.

© Copyright 2002 Star Tribune

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