Every reporter and news director you talk to says they follow the governor everywhere because he can and often does make news whenever he's in public. You have to wonder. Wellstone's poverty tour may have been self-serving to some extent. Politicians' public activities usually are. But if self-service was a criteria for denying press coverage, our esteemed governor would long ago have faded to oblivion.
Entertainment is, of course, the overriding factor.
The public responds to entertainment in ways it never has, and probably never will, to earnest social policy. If Wellstone had taken Pamela Anderson with him to Tupelo, Miss., and sung a medley of Elvis tunes with her, he'd have drawn local cameras. WCCO-TV's Pat Kessler remembers putting in a request to spend four days with Wellstone in Mississippi. Something about satellite access out of Memphis, if I remember,'' Kessler says. The governor makes a point of rarely interacting with the Capitol Hill press corps when he's in Minnesota.