The Last Recount

It's no surprise that Coleman went into red-baiting mode after the election. Like Franken a transplanted New Yorker ("I'm the New York Jew who actually grew up in Minnesota," Franken jokes), Coleman is a creepy, weird-looking character, a beanpole in a suit topped with a rigid mousse helmet of politician hair, like the offspring of a mop and a game-show host. He also has the misfortune of having perhaps the worst sense of humor of any politician running for office this year — a trait that shone through brilliantly in his relentless anti-Franken attack ads, some of which were monstrously, wonderfully unfunny. The best was an ad showing three dipshit-schmoes in bowling shirts — horrible, slovenly caricatures of "regular guys" that apparently represented Coleman's idea of average Minnesotans — one of whom railed in an overdone Ralph Kramden voice against the liberal Franken, suggesting that maybe they should run for the Senate. "Why not? We're just as qualified," the schmoe says. "And we're better bowlers!" In the annals of dumb, condescending campaign horseshit, it ranked right up there with the "I met Harold at the Playboy party!" Harold Ford-digs-white-chicks ad in 2006.

Coleman's campaign in general was relentlessly nasty and negative, and included such highlights as an attack ad that starred an outraged, teddy-bear-clutching eight-year-old girl. ("You know what his excuse was?" the girl says of Franken, who had mistakenly underpaid his taxes. "He said no one told him to do it!") Coleman brought in Rudy Giuliani to remind voters that the Senate is "not a joke," and then repeatedly pointed an accusing finger at the damning evidence of Franken's funniness — including a furious campaign against a never-aired SNL skit idea of Franken's about Andy Rooney feeding Lesley Stahl sleeping pills and raping her in a closet. Why bring up policy when you can focus on stuff like this?

Despite evidence that the relentless negativity hurt him in the polls, the Coleman camp redoubled the same strategy after election night ended with the near-tie, accusing Democrats of trying to "stuff the ballot box" and engaging in "shenanigans." Coleman lawyer Fritz Knaak, a surprising late-season entrant in the nation's Asshole of the Year race, complained that the neutrality of the vote-counting process has been "breached" and that the "supercharged environment we're in leads us to suspect everything."

Knaak even concocted a Florida-style story of skulduggery, accusing Minneapolis Elections Director Cindy Reichert of keeping 32 absentee ballots in her car "for several days" after the election. Knaak later admitted there was nothing to the story, but that didn't stop it from being repeated by Sean Hannity, Brit Hume and almost every other hardcore right-wing joker who reported on the matter.

But despite the best efforts of Coleman and other straggler-followers of the old-time religion to turn the recount into a full-blown Florida-esque partisan war, the bloodlust had mostly died down within a few weeks after the election. Perhaps most significant was the retreat of Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, from the mudslinging arena. Having initially supported Coleman's accusations of impropriety with suggestions that "strange" and "concerning" things had taken place in the recount process — in one particularly embarrassing performance, he tried to repeat Knaak's bogus "ballots in the car" story live on Fox News, but he couldn't even get Reichert's gender straight — Pawlenty suddenly reversed course and began campaigning for caution and calm. "It's in nobody's best interest, whether you're a Republican or Democrat or something else, to be taking shots unless there's some reason to do so," Pawlenty said on the same day Franken met with his campaign volunteers. "Unless there is evidence, let's not be throwing gasoline on the fire."

The public chiding of Coleman to chill out by Pawlenty, the state's most prominent Republican and a much-talked-about potential presidential candidate in 2012, is the kind of thing that probably wouldn't have happened back in the heyday of Newt Gingrich or Karl Rove. But this just seems to be the wrong time in American history — and the wrong state — to start a full-blown piss-fight.

"Coleman tried to turn this into a real Warren Christopher/James Baker dueling epic," says a Franken campaign aide. "But the thing about Minnesotans is that everyone is just sort of calm here. It kind of doesn't work."

Even one of the most conservative newspapers in the state, the Fairmont Sentinel, which enthusiastically endorsed Coleman, has been turned off by his hysterics since election night. Among other things, the paper was mortified by Coleman's post-election pronouncement that he had "won" the race, calling for Franken to concede despite the mandatory recount.

"It's hard to believe we're writing this," the paper wrote, "but it's clear that Franken...is the one acting with class in this serious situation."