Unclubbable Man Joins World’s Most Exclusive Club

June 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Senate | 1 Comment 

Robert Nedelkoff has examined the mathematics of Senator-Elect Franken’s “victory.”

The Wall Street Journal today examines the ethics of the Franken camp’s found-votes recount strategy:

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don’t end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

In politics, as in life, you make your own luck.  Republicans tend to take a half-hearted —not to say half-assed— approach to the rough and tumble of electoral politics.  This is through excesses of timidity rather than of virtue, to be sure — but the result is the same.  And the word for the candidate who comes in second is still “loser.”

As far as the Senate Democrats who have so eagerly awaited the arrival of this new colleague — good luck to them.  I suspect that they may soon be experiencing a case of the “be careful what you wish for” syndrome.  As Robert Nedelkoff indicates, the world’s most exclusive club will now be welcoming an unclubbable man.  During my several years at Late Night with David Letterman and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, I only dealt with a handful of people who were truly  unpleasant and disagreeable.  The soon-to-be Junior Senator from Minnesota was a member in bad standing of that unappealing club.

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