Lori Sturdevant: A cerebral candidate, a gut-level connection

Paul Wellstone died six years ago yesterday. But he's been present in Minnesota memory time and again as the race for his U.S. Senate seat, now occupied by Republican Norm Coleman, has unfolded.

"I'm running for the mother in Fergus Falls who has to share her insulin with her 23-year-old son because they both have diabetes, and he doesn't have health insurance. We need universal health insurance, and we need it now!"

That's DFLer Al Franken's line. But imagine the voice a little higher and the fervor a notch stronger, and Wellstone's back.

Franken invokes the name -- not constantly, but enough to suggest that the friend he knew well for 12 years is often on his mind.

"Paul Wellstone said, 'The future belongs to those who are passionate and work hard,'" Franken says to rally his supporters. "Let's do it!"

Same liberal leaning, same passion for helping the underdog, same devotion to family, similar age and ethnicity -- the comparisons between Wellstone in 2002 and Franken in 2008 are inevitable. And, Franken told me last week, not always comfortable for him.

"I'm not Paul," he said. "I've made a conscious effort of trying not to appropriate Paul in this process. I'm not going to fill his shoes.

"Obviously I share a lot of Paul's values. But he came by his populism differently. It may have been more in his bones. In me, it comes in my bones a little bit, but it comes more intellectually. I may be oddly in my brain more than in my gut," he said. Then he laughed: "A lot of people would argue about that!"

I won't. I think he hit on an important bit of introspection, one that may explain some of Franken's difficulty in opening a solid lead in the polls in this Democratic-trending fall.

The best politicians connect with people on a visceral level. It's in the almost subconscious way they convince voters of their authenticity and trustworthiness.

Wellstone had that ability. It won him votes from people who didn't agree with his every position.

Franken's not without some capacity to reach people on a gut level. But he has to work at it. He worked at it exhaustively for 16 months to win a first-ballot DFL convention endorsement. He's been working at it with general-election voters ever since. The polls suggest that the effort is paying off, slowly. After trailing in most polls all summer, Franken and Coleman have pulled neck-and-neck.

The Capitol basement's amateur psychoanalysts have it that Franken's interest in not just any, but this Senate seat, has much to do with distaste for the Republican who was Wellstone's final foe, and who dared to call himself "a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone" in 2003. (Coleman apologized soon afterward.)

Franken doesn't say it wasn't once true. Rather, he says, "to the extent any of that was true, it's not now. All you have to do is travel the state ..." -- and he launches into a litany of the ills he has seen that need the remedy of a more competent and enlightened federal government. He tells of veterans receiving inadequate medical care, people losing homes to foreclosure, college students selling their blood plasma to pay tuition.

Wellstone might have told similar stories if he were running for a fourth term this year. But these are Franken's stories. Minnesotans are seeing Franken's campaign, not the culmination of one that came to a premature end in 2002.

Every Franken story is tied to an issue. Press him on his reasons for running, the why of his candidacy, and the guy who responds is more the Harvard math major than the comedy writer. Issues -- Social Security, health care, the war and underfunded troops, the middle-class squeeze -- gradually drew him into this race, he says.

More than Wellstone ever would have, Franken seemed to relish explaining to this newspaper's Editorial Board the six-point test by which he measured the recent financial bailout package and found it wanting. More than Wellstone did in 2002, Franken faults Coleman for not thinking deeply enough about the nation's problems.

Yet Wellstone is never far away. When I pressed Franken one more time for the "why" of the career change that brought him to the ballot, I got this: "It's like Paul said: 'This isn't about power. It's about how you make people's lives better.'"

Then he related his last meeting with Wellstone in October 2002 -- about how the man in the political fight of his life asked first about his friend's ailing mother, and dispensed helpful and comforting advice. As the story ended, the issues-minded candidate's voice thickened with tears.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.