THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda. - Review - book review

THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda

by Paul Wellstone

Random House, $23.95

IT IS PAUL WELLSTONE'S MISSION in life to stick up for the little guy--noisily, and at great length. Anyone who watches Senate debates has seen Wellstone holding everything up with a furious tirade about the neglected poor. When he gets going, Wellstone shouts with real anger, his eyes actually bulging. He's like a cross between Ralph Nader and Dick Vitale.

If Wellstone seems extraordinarily good at this, it may be because he's been practicing it for a long time. "My sixth-grade class was outside during recess playing kickball, and an overweight boy was being ridiculed for being a bad player," Wellstone recalls in The Conscience of a Liberal, his new account of life in politics. "I stopped the game and came to his defense with a passionate speech" Wellstone doesn't say whether he was rewarded with an ovation or a painful round of wedgies. But it's clear a politician was born on that kickball court.

Today, Wellstone still relishes the role of lonely hero taking on powerful bullies. But now it's his fellow senators, sometimes from his own party, whom he's challenging. For instance, shortly after his election in 1990, Wellstone tried to prevent the Senate from passing a $20 billion S&L bailout bill with an anonymous voice vote. The newcomer couldn't believe such a thing actually happened. But when he demanded a recorded roll-call vote, Wellstone writes: "[t]he reaction was swift and decisive ... a wave of Democratic senators confronted me. One said, `what makes you so self-righteous?'" The scene quickly begins to feel like something out of The Godfather. "Another group of senators came over with Robert Byrd, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. `Senator Byrd,' they said, `tell Senator Wellstone what a big mistake he's making.'" Yet Wellstone didn't relent. And now, he says, all controversial measures must undergo recorded votes as a result.

Scenes like these, in which Wellstone irritates his jaded colleagues with some stubborn stand on principle, are the highlights of The Conscience of a Liberal, his account of life as the most outspoken left-winger in Washington. Too often Wellstone is indeed self-righteous--not to mention self-congratulatory, preachy, sentimental, and woefully short on practical political advice. But he also brings an admirably fresh, uncorrupted eye to government and political life. And in the end, he leaves us rooting for him and his garish violations of Washington etiquette. What lessons fellow Democrats can draw from him is another matter.

One roots for Wellstone partly because he's the real thing--an underdog himself. He is a short-statured, slightly unkempt former college professor who is decidedly not a member of the Senate millionaires' club, and never will be. Unlike some other Senate liberals who have a whiff of Chardonnay about them, Wellstone dirtied his hands for years in Minnesota organizing workers and the rural poor, and even getting himself arrested while trying to prevent a bank foreclosure on a small farm.

Alas, personal credibility alone doesn't pass legislation. Wellstone's politics don't produce many real results and often leave him on the margins in the Senate. He frequently finds himself on the losing end of 99-1 votes. And particularly since Republicans took Congress in 1994, Wellstone concedes, "over 80 percent of my work as a Senator has been playing defense ... rather than moving forward on a progressive agenda" Often, he seems caught up in amusing but meaningless squabbles--like forcing Republicans to vote against a non-binding resolution stating that the U.S. Senate will take no action to harm poor children in America. And like every ideologue, Wellstone is too quick to see the world as an epic struggle between Good and Evil--with himself on the divine side, of course. "Truth, beauty and justice did not prevail," he writes of one vote, "and my amendment failed" (Wellstone also doesn't hesitate to name colleagues who let him down. Ted Kennedy was too jaded about the chances for single-payer health care, he says, and Patrick Moynihan didn't fight hard enough to prevent welfare reform.)

Wellstone himself admits to feeling conflicted about this political impotence. "How does being a 'liberal voice of conscience' help people I love and care about who need help now?" he asks. This, of course, is the political radical's eternal dilemma. And it leads to the real shortcoming of Wellstone's book--and his political career: the lack of a convincing case that left-wing politics can muster real voter enthusiasm and therefore achieve any of its goals. (Wellstone got elect-' ed, but only in a state willing to have a pro wrestler for a governor.) Echoing Nader, Wellstone writes of a "forgotten majority" in America, composed of would-be liberal Democrats who don't vote because the Democratic party doesn't speak to them any more. "Unfortunately, I think [Bill Clinton] too often tailored his policies and programs to commercial imperatives, failing to engage ordinary citizens," he writes. "Clinton helped shape a Democratic party that some believe has little purpose other than winning elections."