A candidate for 2000? Paul Wellstone ponders a bid for the White House.

Paul Wellstone is restless. After defying the odds by winning a second term in the U.S. Senate, he could have settled into Washington for a smooth six years of tilting at conservative windmills.

Instead, he's spending an increasing portion of his time beyond the beltway -- picket lines, in union halls, at doorsteps, and in front of rallies. And he's contemplating a run for the Presidency in the year 2000.

"If it were a different Congress, and a different time in the history of our country, I would spend twenty hours a day just writing amendments and bills in Washington," says Wellstone. "But given what I believe in, I just know there is no possible way to push through the kind of legislation that would make a difference. I can stop the worst here. I can effect some small victories that are important -- and I'll do that. But I cannot in this Congress pass the legislation that is desperately needed for this country. Therefore, I feel very strongly that I have to spend more of my time using my position as a Senator to travel, to speak, to organize."

Organizing is nothing new for Wellstone, who at age fifty-two has three decades of social activism on his resume. Already this spring, he has headlined a Baltimore rally to assure that the city's workers are not displaced by "workfare" hires. He has marched with strawberry workers in California. He has spoken at state and regional conferences sponsored by Citizen Action. And he is an increasingly popular keynoter at state Democratic Party dinners.

"My first priority is still to represent the people of Minnesota and to do my duty on the floor of the Senate," says Wellstone. "But from now on, wherever I can go to advance the cause, I'm going to try. We have to recapture our indignation. We have to be bold and advocate a progressive, populist politics for our country -- a politics that is important for people's lives. I think that's a winning politics."

If that sounds vaguely like a Presidential candidate talking, Wellstone acknowledges that, yes, he is considering the prospect of running for the White House.

The one thing everyone understands is a Presidential challenge," Wellstone says. "Clearly, I'm doing a lot more nationally than I did before, and there is a chance that could lead to a Presidential run. I think it just depends on what the reaction is and what things look like as we approach 2000. I think it's way too early to say, Here's a campaign.' But I wouldn't rule it out at all."

But haven't we heard this before? Didn't Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, a man with closer ties to the Democratic Party's liberal establishment and to organized labor, say and do pretty much the same thing in 1992, only to perform poorly?

George McGovern, who knows a thing or two about Presidential campaigning, argues that Harkin started too late for 1992, which made it difficult to energize a potential base that will only come together with long and careful nurturing.

But is it even a good idea for a progressive to run within the Democratic Party? Alexander Cockburn says no.

"Senator Wellstone, I beg you, desist from this mad plan," Cockburn wrote in The Nation. "Better by far that you breach your own solemn pledges and seek to install yourself as Senator well into the third millennium. Be the Strom Thurmond of the nice folk. If you run, you will falsely inflate hopes of a Democratic liberal revival, undercut challenges to the two-party system, rush to and fro across the country begging for money and seeking press attention, fawning on film stars, making a pest of yourself. You won't get far, and in the end, you'll be there at the convention holding up the hand of Al Gore."

If he does run, one constituency that Wellstone will have to work especially hard to bring on board is the gay and lesbian community.

It will not be easy after he cast what many saw as a politically cynical vote in 1996 in favor of the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which undermines gay marriage.

"He's got an awful lot of explaining to do," says Urvashi Vaid, research director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "Here he is talking about the courage he has shown by standing up on issues like welfare reform -- and I think he did show courage there -- but where was his courage on DOMA?"

Later this spring, Wellstone will retrace the steps of Robert F. Kennedy, Who took camera crews to the segregated towns of the Mississippi Delta, the Indian Reservations of the Dakotas, the migrant labor camps of California, the inner cities of New York and Los Angeles.

Wellstone wants to remind an often complacent nation that the War on Poverty has yet to be won.

"I am going to travel the length and breadth of this country, as Robert Kennedy did thirty years ago and as Eleanor Roosevelt did during the Depression, to observe the face of American poverty -- not from behind a Senate desk, but in the streets, the villages, and neighborhoods of those in distress," Wellstone says. Former Robert Kennedy advisers Richard Goodwin and Peter Edelman are helping plan the trek.

"In Washington, everybody is willing to accept less and less satisfying `solutions.' We've downsized our politics and -- understatement of the year -- it hasn't worked well," he says. "So now we've got to rise above it. And, I'm telling you, you don't rise above anything in Washington. I've been on the floor enough on issues of race, gender, poverty, and children to know that there is no way, no matter how eloquent you are, to move these issues solely on the floor of the Senate. You have to go back to the grassroots. You have to show the American people what is happening in their country, show them the conditions, show them the malnutrition of children. Get them back to the point where they will say, 'That isn't right.'"

But will America listen? "There's a constituency out there in the Democratic Party and the nation for this left-liberal populist view that Wellstone's pushing," says David Broder, the dean of American political commentators. "I don't think it's a majority constituency, but it's out there."

Texas populist Jim Hightower thinks Wellstone might have broader appeal. "People are waiting for someone who is willing to throw down the gauntlet and say, We've got to take on the powers that be on behalf of the powers that ought to be.' Do I think Paul Wellstone can do that? Absolutely," says Hightower.

Wellstone recognizes that the Democratic Party has drifted away from its former values. "It is astounding that the Democratic Party is not challenging Alan Greenspan and this monetary policy that fears wage levels will go up," he says. And, while we're at it, what happened to Democrats on full employment? Why aren't Democrats out in front on these living-wage campaigns? Why aren't Democrats talking about the relationship between most-favored-nation status for China and the living standards of people in this country? That's the politics that I'm committed to pushing hard."

He still wants to make that push within the Democratic Party.

"I think third-party efforts can be very important," he says. "I've been tremendously impressed by what Joel Rogers and the New Party have done. But for me, I have definitely made my commitment to the Democratic Party. I still think it's possible to rebuild a progressive base here. I had a chance to speak at the annual Kansas Democratic Party dinner the other day, and I hit all the progressive themes. People came up afterwards, and you could feel the excitement. I realized that the sort of people who are the party regulars out in rural America, and in a lot of urban America, got into the Democratic Party because they cared about these bread-and-butter economic issues. And they're dying for someone to focus on these things."

Whether he delivers that message in 2000 or not, Wellstone says, it must be a part of the debate, both within the Democratic Party and nationally.

"Forgetting the `me,' but remembering what we believe in, it's time," says Wellstone. "Whether it's me or someone else, we've got to try."