Collins -- There's Still Minnesota

Sixty senators (the magic fillibuster-proof number) is still possible if Minnesota goes for Al Franken.


Op-Ed Columnist
The Election Lives!
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new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/opinion/13collins.html
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: November 12, 2008
Americans are going through election withdrawal, trying to adjust to life without poll numbers. Really, we’ve heard quite a bit of whining on this subject lately.
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But there’s still Minnesota! The U.S. Senate race there is up in the air. You may want to consider becoming totally obsessed with it, jumping out of bed every morning and racing to the computer to check for the latest vote count.
Or perhaps not. Still, it’s something to hang on to.
There are actually three Senate races that are undecided, and if the Democrats won them all, they’d hit the magic filibuster-proof number of 60. Alaska, determined to continue in its role as the vortex of all things politically strange, still hasn’t counted tens of thousands of ballots. Georgia has a Senate runoff Dec. 2, and the Democrats have dispatched tons of canvassers to help their candidate, Jim Martin. Martin is a long shot, but we should all be grateful that they’ve found something to do with the Obama campaign workers, who would otherwise have been set loose to wander the country, muttering about change and attempting to register household pets to vote.
But we digress. About Minnesota. Right now, the incumbent Republican, Norm Coleman, is about 200 votes ahead of the Democratic challenger, the former comedian Al Franken. In a race where 2.9 million votes were cast, Coleman is leading 41.99 percent to 41.98 percent.
You may notice that there are a lot of percents missing. They went to Dean Barkley, an underfunded Independence Party candidate who did rather well by running on a platform that boiled down to: 1) Not crazy 2) Not Norm Coleman and 3) Not Al Franken.
“We had a campaign in which both candidates came out with equally low favorable ratings. They were not well-liked,” said Larry Jacobs, a professor of political science and the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.
Since Barack Obama won Minnesota by 10 percentage points, it is probably fair to conclude that Franken underperformed. He worked hard and knew a lot about the issues. But it turns out — and people, you may be surprised to hear this — that being a stand-up comedian is not the best possible preparation for becoming a U.S. Senate candidate.
I know, many of you feel that the Senate would be a much better place if there were fewer lawyers and more comedy writers. But, as Franken has discovered, there are disadvantages to entering the political fray from a profession in which writing an essay for Playboy entitled “Porn-O-Rama” is considered a plus.
As time passed, many voters in Minnesota decided that there are things worse than a history of making offensive jokes, one of them being a history of supporting George W. Bush. Coleman’s lead began shrinking. Both parties started pouring money into Minnesota. Both candidates cannily invested in negative ads, which were extremely effective in getting people to vote for Dean Barkley.
My personal favorite was a Coleman spot that had Hollywood celebrities saying they were embarrassed to be in the same business as Al Franken. It was far from the meanest. But it is really not all that often that you get the opportunity to see Stephen Baldwin, Pat Boone and the guy who played the mailman on “Cheers” all in one place. “We don’t all write dirty articles for Playboy!” yells Victoria Jackson, a “Saturday Night Live” alumna whose personal Web site announces: “I hope that America realizes that Obama is a communist before it’s too late.”
Experts say the lead in this race could shift several times before the recount is over. Paranoia runs deep. Questions surfaced about some ballots that spent time riding around in an election official’s car. The secretary of state has been accused of collaborating with Communists. (There seems to be an awful lot of this going around lately.) Both sides have charged hanky-panky involving Somali polling place translators.
If all else fails, the election could wind up being decided by the Senate. This would be bad for democracy but extremely exciting for those among us who have always yearned to re-live the election of Rutherford B. Hayes.
Now if there was a 200-vote Senate victory in New York, you would not see a new senator seated until 2050. However, our party leaders try to protect us from these problems by making sure there is never more than one candidate in any race that a sane human being could possibly vote for.
But Minnesota has a well-organized system for dealing with close election counts. Right now, it’s in the audit stage, which will be followed by the recount stage, which is followed by the judges-poring-over-questionable-ballots stage.
“It’s an entirely transparent process,” said Jacobs. “Come along and bring a bucket of popcorn and watch.” Given the state of the current television season, it sounded like a strangely attractive invitation.