The Last Recount

The Coleman campaign refused to return my phone calls for comment — hardly surprising, given the crisis besieging the senator right now. In addition to the electoral limbo that has enveloped him, a snowballing corruption scandal is gathering speed and heading right for the hapless senator — suggesting that a Coleman recount victory could be a short-lived affair.

Earlier this year, Coleman was named one of the four most corrupt senators by the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The main complaint was the discovery that Coleman had been living rent-free in a basement apartment in the Capitol Hill townhouse of a Republican operative named Jeff Larson, who happens to run a telecommunications firm called FLS Connect (which worked for the McCain campaign to issue anti-Obama robo-calls plugging the Bill Ayers connection). Coleman's political action committee has paid FLS Connect some $1.6 million since 2001, and Coleman hired Larson's wife as a "casework supervisor" in his St. Paul office, paying her a total of $101,218.

Then came an even weirder story: Reports surfaced that an Iranian businessman named Nasser Kazeminy had not only paid for Coleman's "lavish clothing purchases" at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis but had forced the former CEO of Deep Marine Technology, an offshore-drilling supplier in which he is a major investor, to make illegal payments to Coleman. In a lawsuit, the ex-CEO, Paul McKim, alleged that Kazeminy forced the company to make three dummy payments of $25,000 apiece to a Minnesota insurance company called Hays, where Coleman's wife — an aspiring actress and inventor best known for her "Blo & Go" (that's not a joke) hands-free hair-dryer attachment — works, ostensibly, as an insurance agent. According to McKim, Kazeminy said the payments were necessary because "U.S. senators don't make shit." He added that the Iranian told him Coleman's wife worked at Hays and "she could get the money to him."

Making matters even more damning for Coleman, another lawsuit filed by other shareholders in Deep Marine Technology alleged basically the same thing, with one addition: The new suit accuses Kazeminy of trying to use the company to make payments to Coleman directly, before he cooked up the scheme to funnel the money through the senator's wife. Both suits include what appears to be ugly evidence, including a $25,000 invoice from Hays to Deep Marine Technology for services that apparently were never rendered. (Coleman, Kazeminy and Hays all deny the allegations.)

If Coleman ends up losing the recount, the Kazeminy scandal may be nothing more than a final, quirky footnote to the 2008 presidential race. Coleman, after all, played a prominent role in the McCain-Obama contest by spearheading the Republican drive to expand offshore drilling, the lifeblood of his pals at Deep Marine Technology. On June 12th, Coleman introduced a bill in the Senate that called for more drilling in American waters; five days later, on June 17th, John McCain, in a complete reversal of his previous position, came out in support of more offshore drilling. After initially arguing that an expansion would do nothing to increase America's energy independence, Obama himself eventually came out in favor of drilling — although he insisted that other energy measures were far more important.

Wouldn't it be something if all that flip-flopping, cross-accusations and idiotic campaign noise had its roots in Norm Coleman taking 75-large and a bunch of Neiman Marcus suits from some Iranian dude with an offshore-drilling supplier? "They didn't pay his wife $75,000 for nothing," says Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Something is going on here, but we don't know what it is." The Senate Ethics Committee has yet to announce an official investigation into the lawsuits.

In sharp contrast to Coleman, Franken is about as clean as a politician gets. What's more, he offers an interesting referendum on the relationship between humor and politics. Given that humor is about telling the truth and politics is about pretending to tell the truth, Franken's career in a sense is a reverse of predecessor entertainer-pols like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura — he is defecting from a world of reality to a world of make-believe, not the other way around.

Which only makes it depressing to hear him spout schlock political lines ("As you go around Minnesota, I hear from people. And they're anxious about the future") or commit humor sacrilege and apologize for his darker jokes ("There have been jokes that I've done that weren't funny....I'm sorry for that"). When I ask him about Coleman accepting free suits from a campaign contributor, I can almost hear him crafting a joke on the subject — only to have him catch himself and go all serious on me: "The culture of corruption in Washington is everyone's problem, and I'm going to make sure I do everything in my power to fight it."

It's sad to see this kind of transformation, but I suppose we should give Franken a chance to prove that a win in this recount will not be a step down on the scale of humanity. After all, it's funny enough to realize that the ugliest, mudslingiest campaign season in recent history may well end with a quiet, civil, orderly recount in a laid-back Midwestern state that saves its vitriol for hockey games. The Bush era is gone, and this time around there will be no mob scenes, no high-court coup d'état, no hired tough guys in chamois shirts barging into the counting rooms. We're past that shit and neck-deep in real problems now. But don't expect it to last. If Franken wins the recount, as analysts think he might, he can look forward to a first term as the right wing's chief symbol of the coming Apocalypse. Which, if he plays things straight enough, might be his funniest role ever.

[From Issue 1067 — December 11, 2008]

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