Presidential Aspirations
Shortly after his re-election to the Senate in 1996, Wellstone began contemplating a run for his party's nomination for President of the United States in 2000.
As the first stage in his campaign, he embarked in May 1997 upon a cross-country speaking and listening tour that he dubbed "the Children's Tour." This tour, which took him to rural areas of Mississippi and Appalachia and the inner cities of Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, was intended to retrace the steps taken by Senator Robert F. Kennedy during a similar tour in 1966, in order to highlight the fact that conditions had not improved, as well as to test his message.
In 1998, Wellstone began to more openly investigate the possibility of running for president. He formed an exploratory committee that paid for his travels to Iowa and New Hampshire, homes of the two first contests of the nomination process, to speak before organized labor and local Democrats. (His catchphrase from these speeches, "I represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party," would later be incorporated into the 2004 stump speech of Governor Howard Dean.)
On January 9, 1999, Wellstone called a press conference in the Minnesota capitol building. Rather than announcing his candidacy, as had been expected, he instead declared that he would not be a candidate. His explanation was that his old wrestling injury (in reality, it would some time later be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis) prevented him from mustering the stamina necessary for a national campaign. Later that year, he would endorse the candidacy of former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, the only Democrat to run against Gore.
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