Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [75]
Then Kahn named a number of Republicans in the audience: “Senator Domenici, Senator Brownback, Senator Lugar, Senator Hagel, and Senator De Wine, who are here tonight, are all Republicans for whom Paul had the utmost respect and whom he considered to be true friends.” Cheers. Prolonged, warm, appreciative applause, as the crowd embraced the Republicans who had come to pay their respects. It seemed to me like things were back on track.
But it turned out that Kahn was going someplace I had never heard anyone go before. He said to the Republicans, “Can you not hear your friend calling you one last time to step forward on his behalf to keep his legacy alive and help us win this election for Paul Wellstone?”
That was bizarre, I thought. You can’t ask Republicans to stump for Mondale. Still, the crowd kept cheering. This was three hours into the event, and the emotion was so intense that everyone was responding to everything. They had just cheered for Paul’s friendship for the Republicans, and now they were cheering for the same Republicans to drop their own candidate like a hot rock.
Kahn ended his speech by repeating his final line three times: “We are gonna win this election for Paul Wellstone!” I looked at my brother, and he shrugged.
George Latimer, former mayor of St. Paul and emcee for the event, came back up and tried to do a little damage control by making a joke. “I was getting a little bit worried that the last speaker had a certain partisan tinge to his remarks,” he said, “and I was glad that he concluded that with a call for bipartisanship.” Big laugh. But some people watching at home had a sour taste in their mouths.
By one estimate, at least 630,000 people in Minnesota watched at least part of the memorial on TV. Reasonable people of goodwill were genuinely offended. And to people who only saw the ten-second clips that were later repeated and repeated on TV, it looked like Kahn and the crowd were just being foot-stompingly partisan—that Wellstone’s death was being used for political gain.
But Kahn’s speech was also full of phrases like “[our] hearts are now shattered” and “tonight we are filled to overflowing with overwhelming grief and sorrow.” This speech was coming from someone who was crushed by the deaths of his best friend, his best friend’s wife, his best friend’s daughter, and three other very close friends. Yeah, it had some inappropriate moments. But I assumed that people would understand, and cut the man a little slack.
Governor Jesse Ventura, who by then was deeply unpopular in Minnesota, had chewed gum through the first three hours of the memorial. After Kahn’s speech, Ventura walked out, saying that he was offended. Now, Jesse “the Body” is not a man easily offended. In his 1999 autobiography, I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed, Ventura proudly describes his visit to Nevada’s BunnyRanch, where he fornicated with what my feminist friends refer to as a “sex worker.” In fact, he proudly wrote that he made money off the deal, by trading his belt made of machine gun shell casings to the sex worker for a trick and ten bucks. “All the girls look like Playboy playmates,” the BunnyRanch website proudly quotes the Reform Party governor as saying. (He denies actually saying this, and I tend to believe him.)
Ventura had no problem with the BunnyRanch, but Kahn’s speech was beyond the pale. In fairness, Ventura never described any of the sex workers as being overly partisan. Maybe he really was offended by the memorial and not just showboating the way he had every other moment of his public life.
So some people were offended, and some people were moved. I thought the story was over. The best summary of it all was Joe Klein’s piece in The New Yorker.
The memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone held last Tuesday evening in the Williams arena, on the University of Minnesota campus, was overlong,