Wellstone should've lost, but he so relished campaigning for office (and his ads were frustratingly (to us) funny and made him hard to dislike -- as long as you paid no attention to his ghastly voting record). Boschwitz looked like a tired old corpse in the '96 rematch compared to the ebullient Wellstone (and those sorts of grudge rematches often never turn out well for us, we'd have been better off letting either Jim Ramstad or Arne Carlson take a thwack at Wellstone that year). What was sad for Wellstone is that had he not broken his word in 2002, he'd not have been campaigning for a 3rd term which caused his and his wife and kid's death, he'd now be back teaching at his old college.