What’s got into
Norm Coleman? His whole political career has been the slippery, cheesy-smile sort. He’s changed parties, changed views, done whatever he had to do to get elected. You can’t get more lightweight than Norm Coleman. His really big accomplishment was getting a professional hockey franchise in St. Paul when he was the mayor.
Except now his career-accomplishment is
refusing, against all evidence and odds, to admit defeat to
Al Franken in the Minnesota Senate race.
All of a sudden, he’s
an extreme, recalcitrant, crazy man. A martyr. A symbol. Mr. I’ll-never-ever-not-today-not-tomorrow-give-up. He has gone from a man of infinite phony-baloney social charm to a demanding, insistent, miserably drunk guest who doesn’t know when to leave.
A man who, not too long ago, would have done virtually anything to be liked, is now a national oddball.
Has he gone crazy (and will he ever stop being crazy)? Has the entire Republican Party, vested in his last stand, gone crazy—or is there an actual strategy here?
(AP Image)
Partly this is about the new science and legal procedures of close elections. There used to be the assumption that if you stood in the way of an election, if you frustrated democratic procedures, you’d end up being the villain—and sore loser. Nixon folded in 1960 on that basis. But Al Gore, in 2000, became the opposite model: not just a sappy loser, but one who made George Bush possible. The 2000 lesson, learned by Norm Coleman, was
frustrate, resist, object, litigate, appeal.
But now Coleman is the new cautionary model.
Egged on
by hardcore contributors (in other words, he has a financial stake in not throwing in the towel), by the symbolic weight of the contested seat representing just one short of a filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats, and by the general Republican sense of there being nothing more to lose (so why the hell not go for broke), Norm Coleman has begun to see himself as a man against the world, a Mr. Smith precluded from Washington.
His singular job as the once-and-he-hopes-future senator from Minnesota is preventing Al Franken from being the senator from Minnesota. There’s calculation here: The next best thing to the Republicans having a senator from Minnesota is the Democrats not having one.
Still, from Coleman’s point of view, it’s dicey. It not just that he risks a reputation as a spoiler, and a prick, and a man who won’t yield to reason, but he invariably begins to lose a clear sense of reality. Perspective and proportion necessarily begin to depart. He’s surely finding himself more and more in emotionally fragile territory—he seems always on the verge of tears.
And yet, emotional precariousness aside, this does seem to indicate a kind of mettle and guts nowhere evident in his long career of ass-kissing.
Or it indicates how desperate a man can be these days to hold on to his job.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com
