Paul Wellstone was my good friend, as was his wife Sheila. I first met them in the early 1970s when Paul was intensely engaged by his work with the Organization for a Better Rice County, which is what this book is about. At the time, he was a young assistant professor of political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. One of his tasks was to administer the annual urban problems lecutre, and that year (it must have been 1973 or 74) he invited me to be the speaker. Paul picked me up at the Minneapolis airport and drove me to his home in Northfield. He had evicted his son David from the basement bedroom so I could sleep there, and over the next few days I ate meals with the family (I remember spaghetti and meat sauce), met Paul's colleagues and especially his beloved students, spoke to his classes, and heard all about OBRC. We became friends, and we talked and visited each other frequently for the next thirty years.

I was also deeply involved with grassroots organizing, especially with the welfare rights movement, so from the first we had lots to talk about. Most of the women in welfare rights groups were black or Hispanic and from big cities. They had the advantage of feeling themselves to be part of the larger movement of the minority poor that was engulfing the country. The people who had come together in OBRC were rural whites, and they could not easily identify with a movement of urban minorities. Yet their issues were similiar, for they also depended on government programs that were providing shamefully inadequate benefits and treating them disparagingly.

Paul tells the story of OBRC, and describes the people who built the organization, in a way that was almost uniquely his own, and remained so throughout his life. He eschewed academic theories or decorative references or scholarly debates. This itself was no small thing: Paul was facing the hurdle of a tenure decision. He was in fact perfectly capable of spinning academic theories, but that was not what he was really interested in. He was not writing for his tenure committee, but for the people of OBRC, for the student organizers who worked with him, for grassroots activists everywhere. So his account was simple, straightforward, and to the point, and loses little for those qualities. He was empathetic and respectful of the people he wrote about. He never lost that fundamental focus on ordinary people, and the trait of plainspeak to which it led. I think it was part of the secret of his remarkable ability to champion unpopular causes and yet win the trust even of many who disagreed with him.

Much of the story of the OBRC is as relevant today as it was thirty years ago. Indeed, maybe it is more relevant. The housing problems of poor people, including the working poor, are rapidly worsening as housing costs escalate and government supports are chipped away. Welfare benefits are harder to get than ever, and harder to keep, and much of the program has been reshaped to focus on enforcing low wage work by mothers, on virtually any terms. Paul and Sheila were keenly aware of worsening poverty and rising inequality, and some of the boldest and most impressive turns of Paul's later career in national politics reflected that awareness, honed by his experience in Rice County. As a senator, Paul not only dared to vote against the draconian welfare reform bill of 1996, no matter that he faced a tough reelection battle, but he persisted in trying to amend the legislation after it was enacted. He held hearings on poverty around the country, and invited welfare mothers to testify in Washington, D.C. All of this helps account for why the Republican Party was so determined to defeat him when he again ran for reelection in 2002. Had he lived, their effort would have failed.

They would have failed because Paul was pragmatic, and that is what made him a good politician. To be politically effective in the Senate, and to get reelected, Paul had to deal with the scant opportunities that came his way in the grimly conservative era. That meant he had to calculate and compromise, making decisions that were the more painful because they were necessarily made in the midst of uncertainty. You get a sense of this pragmatism in this account of his work with OBRC. He picked his battles there, as he later picked them in the Senate. He was willing to compromise, to take half a loaf. These were hard decisions, some of them were probably wrong, and right or wrong he was often criticized not only by the right but also by many of us on the left who ignored the constraints of real-world politics.

But to be pragmatic is not a bad thing. It is not the same as rank opportunism. To the contrary, pragmatism is the very essence of a political calling, for it means to make the most of the means available to further the ends of politics. The question always is, what ends? Paul viewed politics as a moral enterprise, grounded in basic convictions about democracy, equality, community, and mutuality. Those convictions guided his career in the Senate and shaped the compromises he made. Moreover, it was because he though that most people shared those convictions, if only he could reach out and communicate with them, that he had the confidence and the fervor to mount three successful grassroots Senate campaigns in the face of bitter and powerful opposition. This morally grounded pragmatism shines through this book about Paul Wellstone's early work as a grassroots organizer in Rice County.