Timothy Noah explains how conservatives will miss him more than liberals.

But let's consider a more calculating reason for the right to rend garments over Paul Wellstone. He was more useful to the right than he was to the left. That's because he made liberals seem further to the left than they really were. Wellstone himself stood to the left of everyone else in the U.S. Senate. But when conservatives wrote or talked about him, they usually characterized him not as a left-liberal, but simply as a liberal.