File under 'Why we really need a recount'....

Where's the forest? All we see is a bunch of trees! (0.00 / 0)

Breathlessly, with the discovery of each phantom typo, we will be following the senate recount well into December.  We are missing the big picture here.

Obama won with 1,573,259 votes, or 54% to McCain's 44%.  That is quite a bit more than a landslide, as these things are understood.

Franken, on the other hand, got only 1,211,305 votes, or 42% to Coleman's 42%.  

That means that 361,954 more people voted for Obama than voted for Coleman.  It is hard to imagine how much longer Obama's coattails would need to be in order to give Franken a clear victory.

Doesn't that seem strange?  Franken, after all, was obsessively sold to the DFL as the "electable" candidate.  Other contenders were dismissed out of hand.  Not many people really liked Franken that much.  Not many people actually thought his politics seemed better than Mike Ciresi's or Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer's.  But he was the "electable" one, we were told.

The huge tragedy to me is that Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer was always the better candidate.  He would have brought a discussion of issues to this campaign, instead of an orgy of mud-slinging.  He would have brought a certain dignity to the campaign.  He would have resonated with the "Minnesota nice" that we require, but that turned so many away from both Coleman and Franken and had them vote for "none of the above" Barkeley instead.  JNP was always the best candidate for the job of senator, the best heir to Wellstone's seat, but the convention chose the "winner" who apparently lost instead.

How shortsighted.  How sad.

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by: Charley @ Fri Nov 07, 2008 at 11:09:20 AM CST

Enough (0.00 / 0)

Charley, enough of this. DFL activists disagreed, DFL primary voters disagreed, and plenty of general election voters disagreed with you on the qualities of JNP as a candidate.

Nothing is decided in this race yet, so high-minded prognostication about the dignity Nelson-Pallmeyer would have brought to the race is misplaced. Assuming Franken lost is as bad as Coleman declaring victory before the recount is complete.

There are issues to be hashed out over the lack of Obama coattails in Minnesota, but that's for later, once the recount is done and we know who won. Personally, given recent trends in recounts, I think Franken will pull it out once every last vote is counted by hand. If you don't care that Coleman goes down, that's your problem, not ours.

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by: Joe Bodell @ Fri Nov 07, 2008 at 11:49:29 AM CST

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Joe, I care very much (0.00 / 0)

It matters very much to me that Coleman has an even chance of being in Washington another 6 years.  It bothers me more than I can say.

That's why I was never happy with Franken as candidate.  I never thought he had much of a chance of winning.   With Obama's huge coattails, admittedly, there is at least some possibility at this point.  I won't argue that.

Listen, you are still telling me "enough of this" as if you are still unwilling to listen to any opinion other than your own.  That's the same song I have been hearing for more than a year: "Franken is inevitable.  So just shut up."  

I defy you to find a single word that I wrote or said against Al Franken after the endorsement and right up until the election.  In truth, you can find a lot of public support from me.  I was a loyal Democrat.  I thought Franken was a disaster, but I kept my mouth shut exactly BECAUSE I hoped against hope that Franken just might pull it off, in spite of a degrading and slimy campaign.

So why is it you think that I shouldn't be having a public opinion at this point?  What is now disloyal about saying that another candidate like Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer might have made a better senator and might even have done better at the polls.

Your insistence on some sort of tribal loyalty is appalling, considering the disappointing senate results of the election.  In my opinion, it is the absolutely perfect time for a loyal Democrat to be asking what went wrong.  Why aren't you?  

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by: Charley @ Fri Nov 07, 2008 at 15:23:55 PM CST

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Can we wait on the circular firing squad? (0.00 / 0)

Losing campaigns always have recriminations, that's normal, but Franken hasn't lost yet. If we are to rehash their relative strengths, I like Jack too, but he also wrote books, and Republicans would have twisted his words as much as they did Franken's. Franken had higher negatives, but also higher name recognition which made it possible for him to keep up in fundraising, whereas would have to figure out how to do it cheap. Franken's image going in made it possible for Republicans to define him, but Jack's lack of name recognition and funding would have allowed Republicans to define him just as negatively. I respect the loyalty Jack engendered in supporters, and I could see why, but Jack supporters never recognized that Franken supporters felt the same way about their candidate, and also with good reason. I didn't support Franken just because I didn't want Coleman, but because I support Franken. I got to talk to him briefly about Jack, and I'll tell you that he was as gracious in victory in private as he was in public. Jack was a class act too, and I would happily back him if he ran for something again. But I don't see how he would have done better. Please just recognize that we had a tough choice to make between two good people.

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by: ericf @ Sat Nov 08, 2008 at 02:13:14 AM CST

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Jack didn't win my vote (0.00 / 0)

When I was at caucus, I was mostly undecided. None of the candidates had really reached out to me, none excited me, and I almost went with Jack but his supporters approached me in the last minutes and I told them I was unsure. Rather then sell me on Jack, they bashed Al Franken. I wasn't going to go with Cerisi, so I went back and talked to a Franken supporter and they won me over. They told me why Franken would be a good leader.

I'm sorry, if Jack wanted to win, he needed a better ground game. The Jack people stood around during the caucus and bashed Franken. There were a lot of us who caucused Undecided. Almost all went to Franken as the "recruiters" managed to convince them (and me) that Franken matched their issues. Jack's subcaucuses were very limited in issues and not welcoming.

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by: thatchio @ Sun Nov 09, 2008 at 10:53:09 AM CST

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Palli (0.00 / 0)

a word from Ohio-

Fight for everything voters gave...sounds like you have a Secretary of State who understands his responsibility to the voters, unlike our Kenneth Blackwell in 2004 Ohio.  Our Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner understands that and she is conducting a state Electoral Summit in December to study our progress.

Witness the Recount and shout from the highest roof tops what you see.  
The voting process does not belong to the parties or the candidates. It belongs to the citizens.  

Our 2004 Recount was an abomination in all but a few counties, fraudulent from the intial "random" selection of precincts to count - to the neat stacks of pre-selected punchcards to be counted.  The BOE officials were arrogant and defensive.  I know I was an observer. And all the evidence was destroyed; it is still being investigated, this stain of electoral crime discounted by our Democratic leaders. Don't let that happen to Minnesota history.

The American electoral system will always have new weaknesses because there are American people of ill will, whose trust in us, the people, stops at their own self-interest.  We must be vigilant.  Good luck.

On a personal note, as someone with youthful roots in Winona, I would like to answer a previous commentor.  I am unfamiliar with the primary senatorial candidates in the DFL but ... I do so wish Al Franken could win. Artists, however popular, deserve a voice in the halls of Congress.  If David Wellstone
trusts him that's all I need to know.  About the "nice that seems to be required": with Rep. Bachman-? retaining her seat, I think you will need Al Franken's humor and contagious smile to live it down!

Sorry, I can't completely remember her name but she is as disrespectable as our Mean Jean Schmidt in southern Ohio.

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by: Palli @ Fri Nov 07, 2008 at 13:21:23 PM CST

Coleman is going to make this into a circus (0.00 / 0)

He started fast by declaring victory before the vote had even been finalized (much less recounted). (He was then ahead by something like 0.02% of the vote, now down to 0.009%). Then he blamed Franken for the cost of the mandatory recount. Then he talked about "the healing process", whatever the eff he meant by that. And that was on the morning of the first day after the election.

Now the big Republican guns are gathering to do a Florida 2000 on the state of Minnesota. Within a few days he'll have his loyalists and a lot of moderates convinced that there's been fraud, the same way that he's convinced the voters that "both sides have been terribly nasty". Coleman's character assassination ads were as bad as I've ever seen anywhere. The main thing Franken did was accuse Coleman of being a Republican who supported Bush (true) and accuse him of corruption (also apparently true). Calling a Republican a Republican counts as a smear now, I guess.

Minnesota has a tradition of clean elections and honest politicians, and they don't know how to spot a crook and a cheap-shot artist.  

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by: John Emerson @ Fri Nov 07, 2008 at 15:14:20 PM CST

Forget Nelson-Pallmeyer for the moment (0.00 / 0)

I have good feelings about the guy, but this isn't about him. It's about Coleman and Franken.

My guess is that this will end up being decided in the Senate by a party-line vote, but in the meantime the Republicans will succeed in spreading a lot of confusion and bad feeling, delegitimize the voting process, and send Franken to the Senate under a cloud.

My guess is that Heffelfinger bowed out when he realized how crooked it was going to get. A decent human can't be a Republican any more. We're going to have a pack of semi-criminal operatives roaming the state for a few months.  

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by: John Emerson @ Fri Nov 07, 2008 at 15:20:31 PM CST

Just some thoughts on this thread (0.00 / 0)

First. Whatever the longer term benifits of the Obama candidacy may be, it is clearly hard to argue that he had any coattails.
Al did not run a bad campaign nor was he all that bad a choice. What ifs are all fine, but nobody else would have even come close to raising enough money to compete.
This will not turn into a circus. Norm has alraedy hurt himself with his bow out Al stunt. Minnesotans across the political spectrum are justly proud of our election system. Attempts to challenge it will backfire badly.

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by: Judeling @ Fri Nov 07, 2008 at 18:35:10 PM CST

Obama had coattails (0.00 / 0)

Just not in Minnesota. I think that his coattails were longest in states where the Democrats had been traditionally weak, but were improving -- Colorado, NC, NV, VA. In Minnesota both parties have been pretty well developed for a long time, so there was less slack.

Minnesota's Democratic Party is more liberal than the average, while Minnesota's Republican Party is quite conservative (Bachmann!), which is another reason why there's less slack. Coleman is an especially weaselly guy because his job is to appeal to the hard right wing while at the same time getting some of the relatively few moderate votes in the state. You have trouble doing that with an issues campaign, so he uses character assassination and fluff. (Much like our President of the moment.)

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by: John Emerson @ Sun Nov 09, 2008 at 12:07:25 PM CST