Paul Wellstone: The Life of a Passionate Progressive

6. Last Campaign

6 Last Campaign Surely, politics is made with the head, but it is certainly not made with the head alone. Wellstone’s last campaign would be his most dif‹cult. Although he enjoyed the highest approval ratings of his career, polls showed that a clear majority was opposed to his decision to seek a third term. “He said he’d run for two terms and then out,” one poll respondent told a reporter. “He should stay by that. That’s pretty plain and simple.”1 A promise was a promise; Wellstone’s integrity, which in the past had served as a buffer to charges of being too liberal, was suddenly in question. Republicans leaped at the chance to portray him as an out-of-touch career politician . “[He] went to Washington as Professor Wellstone and he’s now morphed into Potomac Paul,” said one.2 He was vulnerable: in addition to breaking his promise, Wellstone would once again be the target of an intensive and costly 113 Republican campaign. But this time, instead of facing a weak candidate like Rudy Boschwitz, he would run against the hand-picked candidate of the White House. In the months following Wellstone’s announcement, the Republicans’ search for his opponent unfolded like a dramatic soap opera. Initially, a group of in›uential Minnesota Republicans urged a state representative named Tim Pawlenty to seek the party’s nomination. But the White House had other ideas. During the 2000 presidential campaign, St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman had caught the attention of George W. Bush’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove. As one of Bush’s earliest supporters in Minnesota, Coleman had visited regularly with Bush and Rove during the campaign and had impressed Rove as a capable and loyal political centrist—the kind of ally the White House needed in Washington. In early April 2001, while in Washington for a conference of mayors, Coleman had the opportunity to meet privately with Bush. At that meeting, and during a subsequent trip to the White House a week later, Bush, Rove, and other senior administration of‹cials urged Coleman to drop his intended bid for governor and run for Senate instead. In the spring of 2001, he surprised state Republican leaders by announcing that he intended to take on Wellstone. The announcement complicated Pawlenty’s plans. The majority leader of the House, he had spent the previous year deciding between running for governor or for senator. At ‹rst, he wanted to run for governor, but the group of in›uential party insiders scuttled those plans by publicly urging him to forgo a governor’s race. Pawlenty was persuaded, and by the time Norm Coleman made clear his interest in running against Wellstone, he had already made up his mind. PAUL WELLSTONE 114 He scheduled a news conference for April 18 to announce his intention to run for Senate. The night before, he received a call at home from Karl Rove, who urged him not to challenge Coleman for the Senate nomination but to run for governor instead. Pawlenty listened to Rove but told him he was sticking to his plans. The following day, the White House increased the pressure . That morning, Pawlenty was driving his kids to school when his cellular phone rang. It was Vice President Dick Cheney on the other line. Cheney told Pawlenty that he was calling on behalf of the White House to ask him to “stand down” and forgo a run for the Senate. The call came ninety minutes before Pawlenty’s news conference, and it worked. Pawlenty agreed to Cheney’s request and in a dramatic appearance before a packed room of reporters announced that he would not run for Senate. “On behalf of the president and the vice president of the United States, [Cheney] asked that I not go forward. . . . For the good of the party, for the good of the effort [against Wellstone] I agreed not to pursue an exploratory campaign,” he said.3 It was an extraordinary intervention by the White House into state politics. The episode stunned political observers in Minnesota and propelled Norm Coleman to the status of presumed Republican nominee. From Washington, Wellstone watched the drama unfold with a sense of bemusement . “What in the world have I done to attract all of this attention and be such a big target? . . . I have a big twinkle in my eye about all this,” he said...