Coleman: Red-faced Ranter Sings The Blues

Nick Coleman on the "Reds" who wrote him after the election.

You sent me a ton of angry mail, Red: letters giving me "a one-fingered salute," telling me the '60s are over, that I should shut my cake-hole, and sending me a map of the country that seems overwhelmingly red.

Oh, my. Don't be doing that, people. That's rude.

And it makes Coleman think he has material:

And that's not pretty, ever:

Until you study it closely while thinking about where you'd like to go on vacation someday. Do that and you discover that all the places you want to visit are blue.

Wow. I knew that Nick "Knows Stuff", but knowing where I want to go on vacation...that's amazing.

Although among the "stuff" Nick knows, he apparently missed the fact that the Grand Canyon, the Tetons, Glacier Park, Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Roosevelt Park, the Barrier Islands and most of the Rockies being very, very red.

But no matter. Nick's onto something here:

But here's what I found troubling about your letters, Red: Many of you don't seem to realize you live in Minnesota. You think you are in Alabama.

Speaking now to Blue Minnesota: In case you missed it, Alabama didn't just vote red by 63 percent. It also defeated an initiative to remove segregationist language from its state statutes.

Yes, indeed, the 1960s are over. What worries me is the people who want to go back to the 1860s.

Among the "stuff" Nick Coleman apparently doesn't know is how to tell the entire story. Yes, indeed - a measure to remove segregationist language appears to have failed by a razor-thin margin (provisional and absentee ballots are still in play, as is a recount), but not because Alabamians yearn for the antebellum south:

That 1956 amendment was at the center of the opposition to Amendment 2. Critics argued that repealing the old amendment would lead to higher school taxes.

The Alabama vote wasn't about segregation - it was about taxes. Alabamians, like Minnesotans, are tired of slick government attempts to slip tax increases in when we're not paying attention.

But never mind; far be it for Nick Coleman to allow something like telling the truth get in the way of a dig at Republicans.

Back to you, Red:

Yes, George Bush won another term with 51 percent of the vote, which he believes gives him a mandate to stop being Mr. Nice Guy and start getting tough on Social Security.

But not in Minnesota, Red.

Minnesota stayed blue, as it has for 12 straight presidential elections, except the one CREEP stole for Tricky Dick in 1972.

But Nick: we vote as a nation. It doesn't matter one iota if Minnesota voted "blue" - Bush still won.

In fact, we are bluer now than we were four years ago, despite the pipe dreams of Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty and the fact that Bush visited Minnesota more often than a mukluk salesman.

More "Stuff" that Coleman doesn't "know" - Math.

We're not "bluer than we were four years ago"; Kerry won by the same margin that Gore took, and that was after 80% of the Nader voters came back to the DFL fold, and including the population increase of the last four years. Bush gained hundreds of thousands of votes, and kept his margin even.

Coleman doesnt' do percentages? Hell - he doesn't do arithmetic, either. Kerry and Edwards visited Minnesota more than Bush and Cheney. They had to - they figured they were being challenged. Kerry had to work relentlessly in Minnesota, to shore up a Blue state, using time and money he could have spent maybe capturing a Red state.

Well, Red, let's look at some of the true blue things that are hard for you to swallow, and which might make it easier for you if you moved to Alabama or some other red-state Shangri-La.

While you are claiming that 51 percent nationally gives Bush a mandate, you also complain that too much is being made of the Democrats' 51 percent in Minnesota.

You can't have it both ways, Red: A mandate for the goose is a mandate for the gander. With a 3.5 percentage-point Democratic margin, Minnesota is a major redoubt in 19-state Blue America.

More "stuff" Coleman doesn't know: Kerry's 3.5 point margin, along with an almost-equally wispy margin in Wisconsin that was only held by redeploying all of Kerry's resources from every single red state hardly counts as a "major redoubt". How about "hemorraging wound"? And that Big Blue Bang explains why a baker's dozen of Republicans lost seats in the Minnesota House -- that and Pawlenty's Bully Boy effort to whip up votes by appealing to greed and racial resentment of Indian casinos. My favorite losers: Lynda Boudreau, the ex-bandit who helped pass the gun permit law, and Arlon Lindner, our equal opportunity bigot.Ooof. More "stuff" that Nick doesn't know - how to dig beneath the numbers and do serious analysis:

Examining the data, a clear pattern emerges: candidates who ran as fiscal conservatives tended to win competitive races; candidates who tended to run with a more muddled fiscal message tended to lose. Having rescinded the taxpayers pledge was clearly NOT in your interest as a candidate.

"Stuff", Nick. Don't forget the "Stuff".

If you don't learn from this election and keep demanding that your neighbors shut up and knuckle under to the national vote while deriding the verdict at home, then you will be left sputtering to yourselves.

Until you are red in the face.

The "Verdict at home" is this: We're right where we were in 2000, with a slight majority in the House and a slight deficit in the Senate, and a competent governor to boot. We have the White House. We're winning over outstate Minnesota, and losing a few precincts in doddering, first-tier Edina isn't a remote concern; in two years, we'll have both houses.

And you'll be singing the blues.

UPDATE: On a third reading, I noticed this bit here:

Boudreau, the ex-bandit...

Wow. I thought liberals were supposed to be the ones for giving the sucker an even break. Rep. Boudreau paid whatever debt she owed society for her long-ago screwup. Which is more than Nick Coleman can say for his crimes against journalism.

Guess that's what you get for sponsoring a law that actually empowers the common schlubs that Nick Coleman writes about all the time, but seems to fear so very, very deeply.

Posted by Mitch at November 8, 2004 06:40 AM | TrackBack