The Day the Campaign Died: The Wellstone Memorial, Civic Piety,and Political Propriety

摘要

This essay examines the public memorial for the late Senator Paul Wellstone arguing that it is a site of contestation over standards of political propriety. Assessing the Wellstone memorial as a complex rhetorical text, the authors contend that within the experiential landscape of the memorial, discourses that were alternately secular, political, sacred, and ceremonial clashed, violating the generic tenets of eulogistic discourse and casting the memorial as an impious civic event. This unresolved dissonance between politics and piety allowed Wellstone's Republican opposition to strategically deploy a rhetoric of political propriety, triggering a backlash that ultimately fostered Republican campaign goals.