MSM picks up Wellstone/Kennedy meme

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A rightwing meme — that the late Ted Kennedy’s funeral will, as one blogger put it, be the “Wellstone memorial on steroids” – has taken off, with pundits on Fox, MSNBC and conservative media piling on. But it was Al Franken who in 2003 identified the rhetoric being dished out today as distortions of what really happened at the 2002 memorial for Sen. Paul Wellstone.

“All politicos need to remember the Wellstone funeral when a well-known politician dies,” wrote National Review Online’s Kathyrn Jean Lopez, one of several pundits conjuring Wellstone’s memorial in reference to Kennedy’s death. “Instead of memorializing his life, his service turned into a political rally.”

But it wasn’t a rally, as anyone watching the televised memorial can recall. It was a hastily planned commemoration after the unexpected death of a beloved senator. As such, it included eight eulogies (including tributes to all six victims of the plane crash that killed Wellstone), much grief and, as Al Franken put it, one “ten-second clip” of Wellstone’s best friend, Rick Kahn, that was repeated endlessly by national media to create the impression that it was emblematic of the entire event. Kahn, clearly ravaged by grief, told those in attendance:

“We will keep his legacy alive, we must keep his legacy alive, we are going to win this election for Paul Wellstone, we are going to win this election for Paul Wellstone, we are going to win this election for Paul Wellstone!”

But the event wasn’t planned as a political rally: In his 2003 book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Franken talks to an event organizer who says speeches weren’t cleared in advance. Recalls Ann Mulholland: “On Monday night, our press guy said to me, ‘Oh my gosh — this is going to be on TV. Should we be thinking about something?’ By then, it was just kind of too late.”

The political-rally meme was hatched by former Rep. Vin Weber, wrote Franken (who now holds Wellstone’s Senate seat). The day after the memorial, Weber was quoted in the Star Tribune framing the event as a political rally:

When I called Vin Weber to research this chapter, I asked him whether he had watched the whole event and whether he had seen any of the eulogies. He said, “Yeah, there was some very nice stuff.” This candid Vin was a refreshing break from the lying Vin who talked to the Star Tribune in 2002. But Lying Vin had planted the story line: The memorial was a total sham, a political charade.