It will take\u00a0Tuesday’s long-awaited ruling from a three-judge panel, an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court, maybe a swing through the U.S. Supreme Court and possibly a separate journey through the federal court system.<\/p>\n
And if all that works in Franken\u2019s favor \u2014 well, that will be the easy part. Because even assuming he ultimately defeats Norm Coleman, Franken will still have to convince his new colleagues that he\u2019s not just a celebrity.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is going to have a lot to prove,\u201d says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker, \u201cnot only because of where he came from but by the means with which he got there. Republicans are going to regard him almost in the same way as Roland Burris, and clearly he is not.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike all the celebrities that came before him, Al Franken is going to have to demonstrate he\u2019s not using the U.S. Senate as another stage,\u201d Baker says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yeah, that’s part of it.<\/p>\n
Is it that he demonstrates for all to see that Minnesotans – 50.00000001 percent of them, anyway – are, yet again, a bunch of chuckleheaded yayhoos who treat their franchise with all the serious reverence of a frat-party drinking game?<\/p>\n
Yeah, that’s another part of it.<\/p>\n
That since election day Franken has spent less time in Minnesota than some Serbian war criminals?<\/p>\n
Oh, yeah.\u00a0 Big part.
\nIs it that you not only couldn’t find one Minnesotan out of a hundred who could explain to you how we went from a 200-vote Coleman lead on election night to a 300-ish-vote Franken lead today, and that there are dozens of different standards for counting contested votes in this state, and that even the state’s courts aren’t on top of it all, and that an election system which, we’ve been assured for decades, is awash in integrity really seems to be just as malleable and perforated as a New Jersey sanitation contract?<\/p>\n
Yeah.\u00a0 Big part of it.<\/p>\n
It’s hollow consolation that Franken guarantees me six years of great blogging and talk radio material; my gain is Minnesota’s loss. What next, Minnesota?\u00a0 Kathleen Soliah for Attorney General?\u00a0 Betty McCollum as regent of the U of M? Phyllis Kahn carrying the Football for Obama?<\/p>\n
A Minnesotan with a ballot is like a teenager with a can of spray paint.<\/p>\n
Half of ’em, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What’s the worst thing about Al Franken’s slow, apparently inexorable path through the courts to the Senate? Is it that he is – by all accounts from people who’ve had to deal with the guy socially – a jerk?\u00a0 No – we aren’t electing a pal. Is it that he has all the “Gravitas” of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22333,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495\/revisions\/22333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}