John Nichols | The Nation

When initial reports of Senator Paul Wellstone's death reached Minnesota's Capitol in St. Paul, Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party leaders and activists immediately asked: "What about Sheila?"

The question was grounded in a mixture of human concern and political calculation. The human concern could be traced back to the fact that Sheila Ison Wellstone, the senator's wife of 39 years, seemed to maintain a personal friendship with everyone who had ever stuffed an envelope or walked a precinct for the DFL. The political calculation was an extension of that fact: People who knew Sheila and Paul Wellstone were well aware that Sheila was the Minnesota Democrat best suited to win the November 5 election and fill the senate seat left empty by her husband's death.

"You could talk to one and know you were talking to both," explained Sarah Stoesz, a former member of Wellstone's Senate staff who now serves as chief executive officer for Planned Parenthood of Minnesota and South Dakota. "They were fully coupled and united in a way that is very unusual in Washington."

Minnesotans who knew the Wellstones well joked that they were really "co-senators."

So much a team were the Wellstones that, several years ago when there was talk that Paul might not seek a third term, speculation immediately focused on his wife. "There was a lot of talk, frankly, that if Paul decided not to run, would Sheila run? She was that competent and that smart and could generate just as much passion as her husband," recalled Minnesota State Auditor Judy Dutcher.

As it happened, Sheila and Paul Wellstone perished together in a northern Minnesota plane crash Friday, along with their daughter, Marcia, three campaign aides and two pilots. For those who knew the Wellstones, the news was doubly tragic: Not only had Minnesota lost a senator, Minnesota also lost the woman who – because she so clearly shared his values, his vision and his political skills – was best positioned to carry on for him.

There is a long, if not always inspired, tradition of the spouses of members of the House and Senate taking the places of deceased representatives. But Sheila Wellstone would not have merely inherited Paul's Senate seat. Her own political abilities, her extremely high profile in Minnesota, and her record of activism – particularly on domestic violence issues – put her high on lists of prospective statewide candidates long before Friday's tragedy.

In 2000, when Paul Wellstone briefly flirted with the idea of leaving the Senate to run for governor of Minnesota, he acknowledged that many members of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party were speculating about a Wellstone-Wellstone ticket in 2002: Paul for Governor, Sheila for Senate. "The trouble with that," he joked, "is that I'm pretty sure Sheila would get more votes."

He wouldn't really have minded. Paul Wellstone and Sheila Ison fell deeply in love at the age of 16. "I met this cute guy out on the beach with muscles," Sheila explained, decades later. They were about as different as two teenagers could be. He was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had settled in the Washington, D.C., area. She was a Southern Baptist whose family traced its roots back to the Kentucky coal country town of Kingdom Come, although her parents moved to Washington when she was young. When Sheila decided to drop out of the University of Kentucky three years later to marry Paul, who was studying at the University of North Carolina, Paul's father was just about the only supporter of the move. The worry was that Sheila was giving up the chance to make her own career and, in the early years of their marriage, it did look as if that might be the case.

While Paul earned a doctorate in political science, got a teaching job at Carlton College in Minnesota and began to emerge as one of that state's leading activists, Sheila took on most of the responsibility for raising their three children: David, Mark and Marcia -- the daughter who died with her parents in Friday's crash. Paul was running off to march with striking meatpackers and farm protesters, while Sheila was telling him, "Don't get arrested." (When he did get arrested at a demonstration against farm foreclosures in the 1980s, Paul recalled that his first reaction was, "Oh, man, how am I going to explain this to Sheila?")

Behind the conventional façade, however, was a far more sophisticated relationship. Sheila Wellstone played a critical role in helping Paul put together the historic 1990 campaign for the U.S. Senate that made him a national figure. Soon after Senator Wellstone went to Washington, Sheila found a desk in his Senate office and went to work. She became so much a presence around the Capitol that Democratic senators who were close to Wellstone did not ask how he was going to vote on a particular issue; instead they would inquire: "What did Sheila tell you?"

What Sheila told him was to get a lot more involved with the fight against domestic violence. Paul Wellstone came to the Senate as a economic populist with a penchant for peace and social justice causes. Sheila Wellstone helped him to recognize that passing legislation to protect abused women was central to achieving justice.

"Her work saved the lives of countless numbers of women from danger and even death," Shelley Johnson-Cline, executive director of the St. Paul Intervention Project, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press after Friday's crash. "She made it her mission to change that system. She would find out what the needs were and then go out and see them for herself."

Sheila Wellstone said she was attracted to domestic violence issues for the simplest of reasons: "I find it absolutely intolerable to think that a woman's home can be the most violent, most dangerous and oftentimes the most deadly place she can be," Sheila explained. But her activism was anything but simplistic. Mentored by Peacelinks campaigner Betty Bumpers, the wife of former Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers, she learned to use her stature as the wife of a senator to meet academics, law enforcement officials, lawyers, judges, activists and thousands of women and children for whom debates about domestic violence were not merely intellectual or legislative concerns. By 1993, she was writing pieces of legislation that her husband would introduce, including a provision to the Centers for Disease Control budget that provided funding for a project that trains health care providers to recognize and assist victims of abuse and a bill that provided money to set up facilities where parents who were separated would be able to exchange children for visitation without having to face the threat of violence.

In 1994, the Wellstones were key players in the push for passage of the landmark Violence Against Women Act.

Sheila did not have to talk Paul into voting against welfare reform in 1996. But her research provided him with information that he would use to make the case for his vote, a case that ultimately derailed Republican efforts to unseat him that year. In the late 1990s, Sheila Wellstone was an activist on behalf of moves to modify welfare-to-work requirements in order to ease the burden on abuse victims – testifying before state legislators on behalf of using waivers made possible under the Family Violence Amendment that Paul had been instrumental in passing.

On the morning Paul and Sheila Wellstone died, the media was reporting that one of the suspects in the Washington, D.C., sniper case was being held under a federal law designed to prohibit people who have been placed under a restraining order for domestic violence from possessing firearms. That rule, part of the Domestic Violence Firearms Prevention Act, was pushed toward enactment in the Senate by Paul Wellstone -- after Sheila Wellstone developed it.

A majority of House Democrats on Thursday rejected President Bush's request for blank-check authority to wage war with Iraq, despite the fact that House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Missouri, helped draft the resolution and lobbied for its passage.

As expected, the resolution authorizing Bush to order the invasion of Iraq – without a Congressional declaration of war -- passed the House and Senate easily in votes late Thursday and early Friday. The Senate approved the resolution by a lopsided 77-23 vote; the House by a somewhat narrower 296-133 margin.

The surprise came in the size of the vote against the resolution. Just weeks ago, when foes of the administration canvassed the House to determine the size of the opposition bloc, they counted just a few dozen firm votes against the administration's proposal.

Even as Thursday's vote approached, an "alternative to war" resolution proposed by US Rep. Barbara Lee, D-California, attracted just 39 co-sponsors. The relatively small number of caucus members who had expressed explicit opposition to the resolution before the vote led Gephardt aides to suggest that the minority leader's outspoken support for the Bush administration's hard-line position – a stance that made opposing the president's request more difficult – would be vindicated as a clear majority of House Democrats would join the Republican majority to back the resolution.

But Gephardt, a man whose presidential ambitions are no secret, was not vindicated.

Of 207 House Democrats voting on the resolution, 126 opposed it, while only 81 voted for the measure. "I hope the story today won't be (that) this is a huge, overwhelming victory for the president of the United States and for war, beacuse it is not," said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, who was one of the first to break with Gephardt on the issue. "I think what we did will surprise some people. This (the larger-than-expected vote against the resolution) is against conventional wisdom that 'oh, everybody's going to be with the president.'"

The 126 Democrats who opposed the resolution were joined by one independent member, Vermont's Bernie Sanders, and six Republicans -- John Duncan of Tennessee; John Hostettler of Indiana; Amo Houghton of New York; Jim Leach of Iowa; Connie Morella of Maryland; and Ron Paul of Texas.

The House Democrats who opposed the White House and their own caucus leader included Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who is also the ranking Democratic member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, D-Michigan; the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, David Obey, D-Wisconsin; the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, Charles Rangel, D-New York; and International Relations Committee members Donald Payne, D-New Jersey; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia; Earl Hilliard, D-Alabama; Bill Delahunt, D-Massachusetts; Gregory Meeks, D-New York; Barbara Lee, D-California; Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon; Grace Napolitano, D-California; and Diane Watson, D-California. They were joined by senior Democratic members such as George Miller, D-California, and James Oberstar, D-Minnesota, who told the House: "Our Constitution entrusts to Congress alone the power to declare war, a power we should invoke with great care on evidence of a clear and present danger to our country. President Bush has asked Congress to cede that power to him, to be wielded against Iraq; at a time of his choosing; with or without United Nations support; in a unilateral, pre-emptive strike, on his own determination of the level of threat Iraq poses to our national security. I will not surrender our constitutional authority."

Pelosi, the number two Democrat in the House, was equally outspoken in her opposition to the resolution. Rejecting the argument that the president needed maximum flexibility to act quickly against an immediate threat, Pelosi noted that Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet had told Congress that the likelihood of Iraq's Saddam Hussein launching an attack on the U.S. using weapons of mass destruction is low. "This is not about time," she said. "This is about the Constitution. It is about this Congress asserting its right to declare war when we are fully aware what the challenges are to us. It is about respecting the United Nations and a multilateral approach, which is safer for our troops."

Pelosi joined 70 Democrats, Vermont Independent Sanders and Maryland Republican Morella in backing Barbara Lee's amendment, which spelled out explicit support for the principle that: "the United States should work through the United Nations to seek to resolve the matter of ensuring that Iraq is not developing weapons of mass destruction, through mechanisms such as the resumption of weapons inspections, negotiation, enquiry, mediation, regional arrangements, and other peaceful means." Lee's bill was co-sponsored by 18 Congressional Black Caucus members, former House Minority Whip David Bonior, D-Michigan, and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Dennis Kucinich.

"It is fear which leads us to war," Kucinich told the House. "It is fear which leads us to believe that we must kill or be killed. Fear which leads us to attack those who have not attacked us. Fear which leads us to ring our nation in the very heavens with weapons of mass destruction."

Another fear – that of the Bush political team's determination to make Iraq an election issue for members who oppose the administration – was described by several members as a factor in the timing of the vote and the willingness of House leaders to concede so much of their authority to the president. Rangel went so far as to describe the whole debate as "a diversion that we have been forced to place on the front burner."

Intriguingly, for all the fears of some Democrats that a "no" vote might be politically risky, at least two of the Republicans who voted with the majority of Democrats in opposition to the resolution face difficult reelection fights this fall. Iowa's Leach and Maryland's Morella are among the most endangered Republican incumbents in the country – the former from a midwestern district with vast stretches of farmland, the latter from a Washington suburb. Yet, both broke with the administration to oppose what Leach described as a "resolution (that) misfits the times and the circumstances."

"As powerful a case for concern as the preparatory clauses of this resolution outline," explained Leach, "they do not justify authorization for war, particularly absent further Security Council and multinational support."

In the Senate, one Republican -- Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee -- voted against the resolution. He joined 21 Democrats and Vermont Independent Jim Jeffords in voting "no." The Senate foes were led by West Virginia's Robert Byrd and Massachusetts' Edward Kennedy, the chamber's senior Democratic members. They were joined by Armed Services Committee chair Carl Levin, D-Michigan; Intelligence Committee chair Bob Graham, D-Florida; and Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont.

Among those voting for the resolution were prospective 2004 Democratic presidential candidates Joe Lieberman, D-Connecticut; John Edwards, D-North Carolina; and John Kerry, D-Massachusetts.

Among senators seeking reelection this year, the only vulnerable incumbent to oppose the resolution was Minnesota's Paul Wellstone.

"A pre-emptive go-it-alone strategy towards Iraq is wrong. I oppose it," said Wellstone. "We should act forcefully, resolutely, sensibly with our allies, and not alone, to disarm Saddam. Authorizing the pre-emptive, go-it-alone use of force now, right in the midst of continuing efforts to enlist the world community to back a tough new disarmament resolution on Iraq, could be a costly mistake for our country."

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair presented his "dossier" on the threats that are supposedly posed to the world by Iraq, President Bush was delighted with what he heard from the man Europeans refer to as "Bush's poodle." "Prime Minister Blair, first of all, is a very strong leader, and I admire his willingness to tell the truth. Secondly he continues to make the case, like we make the case, that Saddam Hussein is a threat to peace," the president said last week, after Blair went before the British Parliament to make the case for attacking Iraq.

Much of the American media echoed the president's child-like glee at the release of the long-awaited dossier. "Britain's Case: Iraqi Program to Amass Arms is ‘Up and Running," warned The New York Times. "UK Details Saddam's Thirst for Arms," boomed MSNBC. "Britain: Iraq ready to strike," announced the Atlanta Journal Constitution. "Blair spells out Iraq Threat," came the word from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

As far as the Bush administration and much of the American media was concerned, Blair's 55-page report completed the case for war with Iraq – ideally in concert with the United Nations, but unilaterally if necessary.

In Britain, where political leaders, reporters and citizens actually listened to Blair's speech to parliament – and then seriously analyzed its lack of content – the reaction was decidedly less enthusiastic.

"Saddam may be a risk to peace, but Mr. Blair has failed to make the case for war against Iraq," read the banner headline above an editorial in the Independent newspaper, where the editors concluded, "The real threat to Western security, as 11 September demonstrated, comes from individual acts of terror. A war on Iraq would create hundreds of thousands more volunteers for al-Qa'ida and similar groups. If we really want to make the world a safer place, we have to make the Middle East a safer place. That means a lasting peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. War on Iraq would only render that prospect still more distant."

"We said we wanted killer facts," read the editorial on Blair's speech in the mass-circulation Mirror newspaper. "Instead, these are marshmallow ones." The staid Financial Times added that Blair presentation contained no "compelling evidence" for action against Iraq. " This dossier is not serious," explained former Times of London editor Simon Jenkins, one of Britain's keener observers of politics and foreign affairs.

The British people seem to agree that Blair bumbled when it came to making the case for action. After Blair delivered his speech, a scientific survey of 1,000 Brits, conducted by the prestigious NOP Research Group, found that nearly 80 percent were still opposed to a U.S.-British attack on Iraq that lacked an explicit endorsement from the United Nations.

Asked to name the greatest threat to world peace at the moment, 43 percent of Brits surveyed said Saddam Hussein, but 37 percent said George W. Bush.

Twenty-two percent of those surveyed said they thought Bush was calling for action against Iraq because the U.S. president perceives Saddam as a serious threat to world peace; but 21 percent said Bush was promoting war against Iraq because he was interested in gaining control over that country's oil reserves.

A survey by the BBC of 202 local leaders within Blair's Labour party found that 167 of them were opposed to at attack by the U.S. and Britain on Iraq.

The dramatic size of Saturday's protest against Blair's allegiance to Bush provided physical evidence of the prime minister's failure to convince his constituents that Iraq poses a clear and present danger. A London march that The Independent described as the "biggest protest in a generation," drew 150,000 people, according to police. Noting that authorities routinely underestimate crowds at demonstrations, organizers with Britain's Stop the War Coalition, put the crowd size at closer to 350,000.

Whatever the precise number of demonstrators, the message was clear. "There has been no case made – based on anything other than speculation – that Iraq poses a threat," explained Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspection chief in Iraq, who flew to London to address the protest. "It's not about defense of British people or British interests; it's so that corrupt American politicians can get their hands on Iraqi oil," said London Mayor Ken Livingstone. Tam Dalyell, the senior member of Blair's Labour Party in parliament, argued that: "We are sleep walking to disaster."

Tony Benn, a former Labour Party Cabinet minister who Blair once hailed as a political hero, spoke for the crowd when he said: "We believe it would be wholly immoral and wrong and criminal to attack Iraq and inflict casualties upon innocent people."

US Rep. Nick Rahall's policy pronouncements tend toward announcements about extending water and sewer service in southern West Virginia, or the erection of safety barriers on dangerous stretches of Interstate 64. So much of official Washington was caught by surprise when the West Virginia Democrat appeared before the Iraqi Assembly Sunday "as a member of Congress concerned with peace" and declared, "Basically, I want America and Iraq to give peace a chance."

"Instead of assuming that war must come, let us find ways to discover how to prove that war is unnecessary," Rahall told the Iraqis. "It is time and, in my opinion, far past time that American andIraqi officials talk to each other without threats."

Rahall's trip to Baghdad, which followed President Bush's saber-rattling address to the United Nations General Assembly, drew international attention to a congressman who has spent most of his quarter century on Capitol Hill securing funding for road projects and mine safety initiatives. Unlike Bush, however, Rahall is no newcomer to Middle East affairs.

The grandson and namesake of a Lebanese immigrant who in 1903 settled in Beckley, West Virginia, Rahall approaches debates over Middle East policy from a unique perspective in a Congress with only a handful of Arab-American members. Proud of his ethnicity, Rahall frequently quotes a line from Lebanese-American entertainer Danny Thomas: "He who denies his heritage has no heritage."

Rahall has been a frequent visitor to Lebanon, Israel and other Middle Eastern nations -- traveling as a member of Congressional delegations and on his own to his grandfather's hometown of Kfier, Lebanon. A graduate of Duke University who earned his political spurs as an aide to legendary West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, Rahall has quietly developed a level of expertise on Middle East issues that few members of Congress can rival.

Rahall has frequently parted company with the overwhelming majority of his colleagues on those issues. In 1993, for instance, the House considered a resolution declaring that "the Arab boycott of Israel is detrimental to the peace process in the Middle East and should be discontinued forthwith." It passed, by a margin of 425-1.

More recently, the West Virginia Democrat was one of 11 House members to oppose a December 2001, resolution expressing solidarity with Israel. In May, when the House voted on a resolution that praised Israel's fight against terrorism while placing blame for violence in the region on Palestinian leaders, Rahall cast one of just 21 "no" votes.

While Rahall's votes may look controversial to national observers, they have caused him little grief in West Virginia, where he is regularly reelected with little or no opposition. The congressman is known for maintaining good relations – and an open dialogue -- with both Arab-American and Jewish constituents. Additionally, Rahall's voting record on Middle East issues tends to parallel that of his old boss, Senator Byrd. And, like Byrd, he devotes so much time and energy to bringing infrastructure projects to southern West Virginia that foreign policy issues are rarely part of the homestate debate.

Rahall has won high marks even from those who disagree with him for his expertise and for his attention to humanitarian issues that are often lost in Middle East policy debates. A thoughtful critic of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's actions, Rahall voted in favor of the 1991 Congressional resolution supporting the Persian Gulf War. In the years since, however, he has been in the forefront of questioning the wisdom of US policies toward Iraq.

Rahall signed the letter, initiated by Representatives Tom Campbell (R-CA) and John Conyers (D-MI), that, for humanitarian reasons, called for the lifting of economic sanctions against Iraq. Last week, Rahall cited similar concerns, saying he has decided to travel to Baghdad to "help illuminate the plight of the Iraqi people."

"I'm not going as Secretary of State. I'm not going as a weapons inspector. I'm going as an individual who'd like to cool this rhetoric and act in a calm matter, and show the Iraqi people that the American people are not warmongers," he said on the eve of the trip to Iraq, which he took in the company of former South Dakota Senator James Abourezk. (Rahall and Abourezk made the trip as part of a delegation organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy.)

Rahall said he also was making the trip because of his doubts about whether the Bush administration has made a case for waging war against Iraq at this time.

"Why now, two months before an election? Why was the threat so serious now that it wasn't a year ago. I've seen certainly no link of Iraq to 9/11," Rahall said. "I just don't see a linkage there."