Going Down the Road

During my days as Texas agriculture commissioner, a farmer pointed out to me that you can count the seeds in an apple, but you can't count the apples in a seed. I remembered the farmer's pithy observation when thinking recently about our departed friend Paul Wellstone, for he was a particularly productive political seed, and we'll be harvesting the bounty of his work for a long time. Much has been written about Paul as a model for Democratic gutsiness--his principled stands for example, against George W.'s tax giveaways to the rich and against Bush's knee-jerk Iraq attack. But Paul made another contribution to modern-day progressive politics that might be even more fructiferous.

Paul showed that grassroots matters. Indeed, it was central to his electoral strategy, not only in his underfunded, lovably quirky first campaign but all the way through his last. In a time when the prevailing wisdom of nearly all national Democratic pols is that "strategy" amounts to grabbing all the corporate bribe money you can get, then throwing all of it at the television screen, Paul put an unheard-of 40 percent of his 2002 campaign budget of $10 million into recruiting, training, mobilizing and nurturing a massive army of door-to-door volunteers.

Practicing What He Preached

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