Why did the DFL nominate the one candidate who couldn't defeat Norm Coleman?

Ever since Election Night, when it appeared that Norm Coleman had probably won the election, and especially during the purgatory of the recount and contest, even though it now appears more likely that Franken will ultimately win the seat, that question has been asked, often in the discussion of threads of political blogs.

The question was nourished recently by both Norm Coleman (who said that "any Democrat" other than Franken would have "waltzed into office") and by Mike Ciresi (who said he "would have beaten Coleman by 10, 12 points").

Both remarks are obnoxious in their way. Ciresi's is self-serving (polling never demonstrated clearly that he would have fared better than Franken against Coleman). Coleman's is gamey, as he continues a public relations effort to diminish Franken hoping that this somehow helps him in the court fight.

I'm not Franken's biggest fan. Not in the top 10. I always believed that the vulgarity of his humorous writings and the sarcasm of his radio oeuvre made him an opposition researcher's dream. I've seen him be snotty, condescending, aggressive, and display other personality traits that don't appeal to swing voters, older voters, women voters, polite voters. I've taken the confession of DFLers who just couldn't get around these traits and seen the poll results that showed him losing a lot more Democrats than Coleman was losing Republicans (which, basically, given the DFL edge in statewide party ID, was the only way Coleman could stay in the race).

So, personally, I don't disagree with the argument that a different Democrat might have done better. But it's hardly the proven fact that is implied. People making those statements or asking that question focus on Franken's political weaknesses and ignore his strengths. Namely:

He worked his brains out. Franken did the bean feeds for a year while Ciresi and others were mulling their bids. He worked the house party circuit. He worked the national fund-raising circuit. He showed up. He made his pitch. He never quit. (Although there was a period in the middle there where he seemed beaten. I'm talking about the body language I saw on him at a couple of those house parties where he did this fairly dorky gag of drawing a map of the United States, with all of the state boundaries. At the end, he auctions it off for a campaign contribution.)  He had fallen 10 points behind and looked like he might be crushed by the shame he would feel if he lost the race. Taking Coleman down was a mission for him. He kept showing up.

He is very smart. I'm not talking people smart, but brainy smart and fact smart. For a guy who had never served in public office, Franken's grasp of public policy details was impressive. Franken's gaffes were lapses of taste and political judgment. He seemed able to not only avoid the kind of fact errors that most rookies make, he seemed to have memorized every vote Coleman ever cast.

He improved. In 2004, well after Franken had begun flirting with the idea of a Senate run, he wrote in "Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them" that his next book would be titled "I f***ing hate those right-wing mother***ers." (He once attempted to explain to me some of the many levels of satire strummed by that line. We agreed that I was too humor-impaired to grasp more than one.) In "The Truth, with jokes," written as he prepared to take on Coleman, Franken called Coleman a "buttboy" and said "all Republican politicians are shameless dicks." These were not remarks made in the heat of anger but written in a book.

He improved (continued, since he didn't seem to be improving in that previous paragraph). On into the campaign year itself, candidate Franken still seemed unable to control the, shall we say, less senatorial side of his personality. I do believe that if he had not managed to put a sock in it, Franken's obstreperosity would indeed have cost him the election. But he did. Put a sock in it, that is. In the summer and fall, Franken stopped committing obvious outrages. He kept working hard. He exercised more (some) of what the pros call message discipline (made him much more boring to cover). He still joked, but less often and much more appropriately. He got through the debates without committing one of those magic "I'm-no-Jack-Kennedy" moments that can turn a race. From the cheap seats, where I sat, it appeared to cost him a good bit of his essence, and I'm not at all sure that he can keep it up indefinitely, but I would say it worked. It seemed as if the Repubs had perhaps played their hand too early and could not revive their advantage by bringing up more potty-mouth stuff from the archives. And Franken didn't give them new material.

He ran. Maybe this sounds like the same as "he worked," but it isn't. The comment that the-DFL-nominated-the-one-candidate-who-couldn't-beat-Coleman implies the party had a lot of choices. It didn't. Most of those theoretical Dem candidates who woulda coulda shoulda clobberized Coleman chose not to run. And one of the reasons that comment about the DFL choosing the one guy etc. has been bugging me is that it seems to imply that the nomination was handed to Franken by some coterie of party bosses. That isn't how it worked. Maybe it isn't ever how it works. But there is no such group of DFL big cigars that set things up for Franken and warned all those other (better) candidates out of the race to make it easy for their boy Al. Not even close.

The party leader types of my acquaintance were generally — from the get-go — aware of, and worried about, Franken's baggage and his vulnerabilities.  Many of them tried hard to recruit other candidates. I believe Tim Walz was urged by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee during 2007 and probably well into 2008 to run for Senate. Mayors, promising young legislators, former Senate candidates even a Nobel laureate in chemistry and others thought about it, some came close to getting in, but didn't. I have never heard that any of them were told by party bosses to get out of the way for Franken. A number of them were undoubtedly intimidated by Franken's fame and fund-raising prowess.

Ciresi did get into the race. And I have the impression that he had more party heavyweights rooting for him than Franken did. But he got in kinda late, started slow and ran a weak race. After pledging to abide by the endorsement, he fell hopelessly behind in the race for convention delegates and dropped out before the convention, then talked about changing his mind about abiding and running but didn't. (In his recent I-woulda-beaten-Coleman interview, Ciresi says he also woulda won the primary against Franken but felt he had to honor his pledge to abide by the endorsement.)

That leaves Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer as the only other meaningful Franken challenger. JNP ran an honorable, creditable race, won most of the debates, but was still clobberized by Franken on the first ballot at the state convention, after which he supported the party nominee without quibble. He declined to play the I-woulda-won game asserting, unarguably, that no one knows.

I admire Nelson-Pallmeyer and agree with many of the stands he took that were well to the left of the Franken (yes to single-payer health care, a dramatic cut in military spending, for two examples), but I guess I also subscribe to the conventional wisdom that some of his positions may have rendered him unelectable in a statewide race.

So, "the DFL" (which sounds like it means the party bosses but really means the rank and file member/voters who participated in the caucuses, conventions and primary) chose the only unelectable candidate. And now, barring a come-from-behind Colemanian victory in court, that candidate, Al Franken, was (or will be?) elected. Go figure.