Politics & Power Quote by Paul Wellstone

Wellstone’s line is a rebuke to the spectator-sport version of politics: the punditry that treats public life as a weather report and citizens as passive consumers of commentary. By hammering the negations - “not predictions… not observations” - he yanks legitimacy away from the detached posture that dominated (and still dominates) American political media. Politics, for him, isn’t a clever forecast or a grim diagnosis; it’s agency. The repetition of “Politics is what we do” works like a chant at a rally, deliberately simple because it’s meant to move bodies, not just minds.

The subtext is a moral argument about responsibility. If politics is “what we create,” then you don’t get to hide behind cynicism, inevitability, or the myth that outcomes are pre-written by demographics and consultants. He’s also quietly indicting the professional class inside politics itself: the operatives who mistake polling for purpose, and the centrists who confuse caution with realism. His verbs - “work,” “hope,” “dare” - outline a ladder from labor to aspiration to risk. That last phrase, “dare to imagine,” is the tell: this is the language of movement politics, not managerial governance.

Context matters. Wellstone was a populist-progressive senator from Minnesota, famous for grassroots campaigning and for sounding, in Washington terms, inconveniently sincere. In the late 1990s and early 2000s - an era of triangulation, technocratic “solutions,” and post-Cold War complacency, soon sharpened by post-9/11 fear - he’s insisting that democracy can’t be outsourced. His rhetoric turns politics back into a participatory craft, and it does so by making passivity feel not neutral, but complicit.