THE PARADOX OF THE 1996 ELECTION is that the country is moving in a Republican direction, and it’s Republicans who are on the defensive. President Clinton and the Democrats have shamelessly hijacked dozens of their ideas — from a balanced budget and tax cuts to teen curfews and Megan’s Law – – and Republicans have gotten little or no political benefit from it. Instead, they’re frantically defending themselves against Democratic assaults on the few ideas Democrats have not embraced (Medicare restructuring, cuts in federal education aid, regulatory reform). The one exception to the national trend is the Minnesota Senate race.
What’s different here? Only one thing: Republicans are doing to Democratic senator Paul Wellstone what Democrats and organized labor have done to GOP House members across the country. Beginning in May, Republicans targeted Wellstone with an expensive barrage of TV ads tagging him as an egregious liberal on issue after issue. And Wellstone made the mistake of doing what most of the targeted Republicans did: nothing. This allowed the television spots to frame the campaign debate between Wellstone and his Republican opponent, former senator Rudy Boschwitz. Now Wellstone, like so many anxious Republicans, spends a good deal of his time rebutting the idea that he is far outside the political mainstream.
Boschwitz, who was defeated by Wellstone in 1990 after serving two Senate terms, touts the significance of the Minnesota race. Should he win, “it means we’ll keep control of the Senate,” he says. “If I win, it means other Republicans will win and we’ll keep control.” In truth, Republicans are likely to hold the Senate even if Boschwitz loses, but a pickup in Minnesota would all but guarantee an expanded GOP majority (now 53-47). Republicans are expected to carry the open Democratic seat in Alabama and have roughly a 50- 50 shot at capturing each of four other seats of retiring Democrats (Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, New Jersey) and ousting incumbent Democrat John Kerry in Massachusetts.
But nothing would feel better to Republicans than defeating Wellstone, 48, the Senate’s most obstreperous liberal. As a rookie senator, he made a point of dissing Vice President Dan Quayle in person. And while billing himself as impervious to influence by special interests, he has championed the agenda of virtually every liberal pressure group, including trial lawyers. After Republicans took over the House and Senate in 1994, Wellstone noisily balked at their efforts to curb the welfare state. This was politically brave, but Wellstone was also sanctimonious about his rearguard actions. “I was saying, ‘Silence is betrayal,'” he recalls.
Wellstone sounds like a pseudo-Marxist version of Bill Clinton. Campaigning for reelection, he talks up innocuous middle-class issues such as broadening the Family and Medical Leave Act and providing a tax break for college costs. But he also fancies himself a hero of class warfare, standing up to corporate power. In a radio debate on farm issues on Oct. 7, he boasted of challenging major commercial interests. “When you’ve got to fight for ethanol, you’re taking on the oil companies,” he blurted. “And when you’ve got to fight for family farmers for a decent price, you’re taking on Cargill and the grain companies. And when you’ve got to fight to make sure that farmers are able to make sure that their grain is, in fact, put in the trains and goes to market, you’ve got to take on the railroad companies. You’ve got to be willing as a senator from Minnesota to be downright populist and take on those large special interests who are the big givers and heavy hitters and dominate Washington.”
In nearly every appearance, Wellstone sprinkles his comments with references to evil corporate interests. In a debate before the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, he attacked tax loopholes “that go to tobacco companies and oil companies and pharmaceutical companies.” Boschwitz, he said during a debate here, protects subsidies for “large coal companies, tobacco companies, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies.”
Does Wellstone, a former political-science professor at Carleton College, believe all this stuff?. He seems to. Boschwitz says his opponent is a throwback to the 1960s, a notion that irritates Wellstone. “I’m still trying to figure out Rudy’s fixation with the ’60s,” he says. “This is when we passed Medicare, Medicaid, medical assistance. This is when we passed the National Education Act for financial aid to higher education. This is the decade of the civil rights movement.” Wellstone describes himself as a senator “in the Hubert Humphrey tradition.”
Boschwitz, 65, was urged by many Republicans to run in 1994 for the seat of retiring GOP senator David Durenberger. “My family didn’t want me to,” he says. “My business needed me. I just wasn’t ready. It took me a bunch of months to get over 1990.” Boschwitz is hardly a Gingrich Republican. A GOP official characterizes him as “economically conservative, socially ambiguous.” Nevertheless, the contrast with Wellstone is sharp because Boschwitz, who owns a home-supply business, reveres the free market and loathes government economic intervention. “I like free markets,” he told me. “I think most people do. I hope so.” Boschwitz favors the Dole tax cut, opposes the family leave mandate, supports regulatory relief, tort reform, and a balanced-budget amendment.
Republican success in Minnesota in 1994 — Rod Grams won the Senate race and Arne Carlson was reelected governor — and Wellstone’s blazing leftism assured a full-blown effort at taking Wellstone’s seat. The hook for the campaign — Wellstone is “embarrassingly liberal” — came from Boschwitz himself. “I can’t tell you how many people have told me Wellstone is an embarrassment,” he says. “Thousands.”
First came more than $ 1 million in TV ads aired by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They dubbed Wellstone “ultraliberal” and “unbelievably liberal.” He was accused of being “too liberal with our money, too tough on hard-working families.” These were followed by a clever series of ads, one featuring Wellstone’s induction into the “1967 Liberal Hall of Fame” in front of a sparse audience consisting of spaced-out hippies.
The TV assault has had the effect of defining Wellstone, which is exactly what Democrats and the AFL-CIO did with early advertising in the reelection races of dozens of House Republicans. “You’re better off when you define your opponent,” argues Boschwitz. “We couldn’t define him” in 1990. You’re even better off when your opponent doesn’t respond vigorously. Though he’s raised more money than any candidate in Minnesota history, Wellstone said he lacked ” the ability to respond” over the summer. The attack ads “had some effect,” he conceded, “but not a great effect.” At the least, they allowed Boschwitz to pull even in polls, and the race has stayed a dead heat.
Unwittingly, Wellstone has adopted the language of his opponent’s ads, thus reinforcing their message. He insists Boschwitz is an embarrassment. Wellstone’s backing of family-leave legislation “has nothing to do with being embarrassingly anything except for trying to come through for families,” he said in a debate with Boschwitz. And more: “It is embarrassing that you have supported balancing the budget on the backs of our parents and grandparents,” he told Boschwitz. “It is embarrassing” that Boschwitz backed weakened environmental enforcement and voted to cut education spending and “lined up” with “tobacco interests” and “corporate polluters.” Boschwitz was unfazed. Compared with Wellstone, “Ted Kennedy is a conservative,” he said.
Despite Boschwitz’s early tactical success, Wellstone remains a formidable foe. He is an energetic, effective campaigner. He has built up a grassroots army of volunteers that Boschwitz can’t match. The money he didn’t spend last summer he can use now for a late media blitz. And he’s helped by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which may be the nation’s most politically correct newspaper (it backed the North Carolina school officials who expelled a 6-year-old boy for sexual harrassment). The paper gave Wellstone space on Oct. 14 to justify his vote against welfare reform. “I did the right thing,” he said. The next day, the paper announced on the front page that Wellstone had opened a 9-point lead over Boschwitz in the Minnesota Poll. But that was only when minor candidates were listed in the question for poll respondents. When just the major candidates were listed, Wellstone’s lead shrank to 3 points, inside the poll’s margin of error. That’s exactly where the race was in the September Minnesota Poll, which didn’t have a question involving minor candidates. In other words, the paper played up a new question to make Wellstone look strong.
But the biggest problem for Boschwitz is the political environment. “It’s bad,” says Jon Lerner, Boschwitz’s campaign manager. “The reason we’re close is because of the bad environment. If it were good, we’d be way ahead.” “Rudy runs between 15 and 20 points ahead of Bob Dole,” according to Lerner. “If Dole loses by 25 points here, that’s going to be a problem.” In 1994, things would have been different. Wellstone says as much. But two years later, there’s a new “mood piece,” as Wellstone puts it, and he believes he gains from having tried to thwart Republicans in Washington. “You can run [Wellstone’s] way in Hawaii and in Rhode Island and in Massachusetts,” Boschwitz says. “We’ll see if you can do it in Minnesota.”
