Norm Coleman is right, Al Franken is wrong. It pains me to say this. I voted for Al Franken. I would like to see him in the Senate. Norm Coleman is a friendly man whom everyone enjoys chatting up and schmoozing with, but his finger to the wind politics is not for me. 

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As I write this at 9 a.m. the morning after election night, the final five precincts, all in St. Louis County, came in, and Norm Coleman has a 726-vote lead over Al Franken. A recount is inevitable. I pulled a near all nighter, hitting the sack at 3:45 a.m., waiting for the race to be decided. The final 100 precincts in central and northeast Minnesota trickled in over the wee hours. The Coleman margin is less than one vote per five precincts.

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Thankfully, election season ends this week. And with it, the end of the ubiquitous pro and anti advertising over the Employee Free Choice Act that would change federal regulations governing union organizing efforts and elections. I will not begin to even try to get into this debate or explain it as it is clearly not simply about secret ballots as its opponents have suggested nor little people vs. "fat cats" as its proponents' ads say.

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When I was a kid, and my parents would catch me picking my nose, my mother would quip, "pick a winner."

I would never deign to compare the Star Tribune's political endorsement process to nose-picking, but having read nearly a week's worth of them, the first general election under editorial pages editor Scott Gillespie, I must say I am not getting it. Until yesterday's endorsement of El Tinklenberg in the Sixth District Congressional race, the paper has just endorsed incumbents. Republican here, DFLer there.

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One of the more interesting aspects of this global financial meltdown is how there is now a partisan divide over its cause. More and more right-wingers are focused on the quasi-socialist mortgage guarantors Fannie and Freddie and longstanding federal law that compels banks to make home loans to the working poor. See Michelle Bachmann’s recent Strib op-ed for the party line.

Last night’s 60 Minutes (watch the video) took a different tack. Steve Kroft and his producer spoke to several non-partisan Wall Street insiders, and what they had to say was revelatory. The headlines:

—Bad mortgages make up only 6 percent of the overall mortgage pool, not nearly enough to cause a global financial meltdown. Enough to screw up the nation’s housing market and result in a wave of foreclosures, but the bad borrowers and the sleazy brokers are not causing this.

—Everyone knows about the repackaging and repackaging of these high-risk mortgages into opaque tranches of investments that were sold and resold all over the globe and labeled grade A by the major ratings firms. That’s a big part of it, but not what the markets are reacting to now and not what drove Lehman and AIG under.

—This second wave is rooted in something called “credit default swaps,” which many of the largest financial firms sold to buyers of this opaque sub-prime debt as a form of insurance against a default. Now, the insurance market is regulated and requires insurers to carry reserves to pay off claims. But these “swaps” were not and did not, and the coup de grace came when many of the largest financial firms in the world had to make good on this insurance. How was Wall Street able to sell financial insurance instruments without regulatory scrutiny and maintaining reserves? Apparently because the world of “swaps” and their confusing cousins, “derivatives,” are so poorly understood outside Wall Street (though they have their own trade association to defend them, anyway).

—The ultimate conclusion of these experts is that an astounding level of “blue sky” thinking and incompetence drove this crisis from a housing bubble into a global finance meltdown. Excess in the consumer markets was doubled-, tripled-, and quintupled-down by people who should have known better. And it all seemed so complex that no one could grasp what was going on, not the financial media, not the regulators, not the insiders who should have protected their own firms.

The more your learn about this mess, the more preposterous it becomes, the less confidence I have in our system, and the more outraged I get. But don’t let anyone tell you this crisis is largely the fault of borrowers and mortgage brokers. That crisis could have been contained. This thing just ripples, and ripples, and ripples.

Watch the 60 Minutes video, or read the transcript—it is important information.

On the surface, it might not seem like Sun Country Airlines, which yesterday announced it would have to defer half of its employees’ pay for the rest of the year, has much to do with the current Wall Street mess. CEO Stan Gadek was going to get some cash to get it through the slow autumn (its schedule is already a shell of what it was a year ago as it gradually reverts to a charter and vacation carrier) from Sun Country’s parent company, Petters Worldwide, until word came down that Petters was under a massive federal fraud investigation and much of the company’s capital may have been illegally obtained.

Normally, in such a situation, if anything about the Petters mess can be labeled “normal,” Sun Country would look to a lender for a line of credit. But, and I don’t know if Sun Country could obtain financing in its current state, the credit markets are dried up. There’s no money to borrow because banks and lenders are hoarding cash to stave off bankruptcy from all the debt and bad mortgages they are carrying.

So companies either defer employees’ pay or lay them off. If credit isn’t forthcoming in a few weeks, they will eventually shut down. This is the economic death spiral that the freeze-up in our credit markets leads to.

I don’t know about you, but I lost a lot of money in yesterday’s market meltdown: our 401Ks, our kids’ college 529 accounts, some of my wife’s stock options sank further under water. So I don’t really get the members of Congress who don’t want to bail out Wall Street on the backs of taxpayers. Most of us are taking it up the shorts even without the bailout. If the market gained back the 1,000 points it has lost in the last two weeks, I’d have a lot more money, and so would you.

So it puzzles me to see the unlikely array of Minnesota Congressional reps who voted “no” on the bailout. Michele Bachmann was no surprise. You can always count on her not to understand an issue with nuance. Collin Peterson functions like a small-town pol, reflexively voting his constituents angst or pocketbooks. But Jim Ramstad? One of the bits of analysis of yesterday’s House vote was that most of the retiring House members in both parties, absolved of political considerations, voted for the bill, a sure sign that it was the right thing to do.

Ramstad is a sober, pragmatic, moderate elected official. I respect his opinion. His take is that the bailout was hastily put together, insufficiently debated, and we can do better. Perhaps, except that this panic in the markets is making a very good case for haste, no? And I have yet to hear any respected, independent figure outside the House GOP caucus endorse some of the lesser measures it prefers.

Peggy Noonan said this morning on MSNBC that the public has scared Congress (and the Presidential candidates) shitless with outraged calls and e-mails. Those missives don’t manifest any nuanced understanding of the current situation, the bailout, nor the interconnectedness of all of this (see above). Half of us could lose our jobs tomorrow and still oppose the bailout. It’s the American prerogative.

Noonan’s point was that we have reached a Watergateian level of distrust of Washington. No one believes anything Bush says—he’s lied and played us too often. Congress and government institutions have failed in their check/balance and watchdog roles. $700 billion sounds like a lot of money, and Joe Blow think it’s going to go to some investment banker who’s going to use it in Manhattan on lots of $400 bottles of Cabernet and $200 Wagyu sirloins.

So here we are: A nation in free fall, unable to distinguish between schadenfreude and self-immolation. Have a nice day.

This evening will mark the end of Priscilla Lord Faris’s campaign for Senate. The personal injury attorney and DFL stalwart chose about a month ago to pit Al Franken to a primary challenge because she didn’t like his coarse language, he lived in New York for years, and he got donations from “outsiders” who are “buying” the election. (The same could have been said of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for New York Senate—minus the Playboy bylines.)

If Lord Faris gets more than aproximately 450 votes, it will be a sign to me that xenophobia and provincialism still play in this place so desperate to prove its sophistication and status as a player among states.

Let’s face it, Lord Faris could not defeat either Franken or Norm Coleman unless one of them turned up with a dead girl or a live boy as the saying goes. She’s just one in a long line of ridiculous DFL insiders who don’t understand what voters want and are steeped in a 1960s view of Minnesota politics—where earnestness, a Midwest accent, and lifelong attendance at the DFL state convention earn you the right to run for office.

I know right now that Barack Obama and Al Franken look like high-risk candidates, but the bland dreck that the DFL placed on the ballot election after election, and its tin ear for changes in the electorate are at the heart of why we have had one DFL governor and two senators in two generations.

Lord Faris, by positing the same arguments against Al Franken that the GOP uses, has merely served to legitimize its talking points in the eyes of women like her, who will surely serve as the swing vote in the senate and presidential race and are trying to decide whether sex quips are a voting issue. Throwing in the caveat that she wants to defeat Norm Coleman doesn’t wash away the hubris.

Hubris? Isn’t that a little strong? I don’t think so. I don’t know whether Patricia Lord Faris is on an ego trip or is just another DFL babe in the woods, but she never had a chance and only served to distract from her party’s efforts to unseat a very vulnerable opponent who does not deserve another term in office.

If she only knew how to field dress a deer.

As part of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine's coverage of the Republican National Convention, I will be blogging live about the media scene and other happenings going on around town, which you can read here.

I'll resume writing this blog next week.

Thank you.

—Adam Platt

If you’ve followed this blog, you are aware I like to travel and am dismayed at the government’s failure to invest in a safe and reliable transportation system—roads, rail, and air. In recent months, many advocates have decried that the country is on an unsustainable path that is driving the nation toward gridlock and leaving people without alternatives. New Yorkers routinely have to factor in hours of delays when traveling in and out of the region’s three airports. It’s often the same in Chicago.

Now a truly important voice has spoken up. Robert Crandall, longtime (and ex-) CEO of American Airlines, the man who lead the carrier to a position as the nation’s largest (and one of the world’s most respected) airlines. His comments in a recent speech should come as a wake-up call to government. It advocates a radical cure to save the nation’s airline industry, which he believes is locked in a vicious cycle of bankruptcy to bankruptcy.

This is not about any specific airline but about how deregulation, high oil prices (not the primary problem, he argues), and government’s refusal to modernize the system of airports and air traffic control and adequately fund roads and rail have left the airlines with no choice but to compete in ways which threaten their stability and leave them at odds with their customers.

Crandall loves the aviation businesss, and his prescription, though perhaps not something we could achieve consensus on, contains some harsh truths that the public must come to accept (the inevitability of higher airfares in some cases, taxation to modernize the nation’s transportation infrastructure) if we are ever going to get anywhere. It’s important reading, if you’re someone who ever has the need to get outta town.

My sum total of experience with Al Franken consists of three encounters:

—An interview I conducted with him at his home in Manhattan around 1999. He was gracious, not exactly gregarious, but made time for me outside of normal business hours.
—An authentic, emotional, and quite impressive (and unpolished) speech he gave at Temple Israel a few years later.
—A fundraiser last summer with him and Robert Kennedy Jr. Franken seemed more machine-like and a bit heavy on the rhetorical fervor, but the forum lent itself to that.

A year later, I seem to be one of the few moderate lefties who still wants to see Al Franken elected. Heavy hitter DFL friends of mine say stuff like “Amy Klobuchar says Norm Coleman has worked very cooperatively with her.” Others tell me that Franken is unfriendly and insular when they’ve met him. That he seems aloof and ungracious in showing appreciation to people such as waitresses and caterers. And I keep hearing that he’s “angry” from people who I know to be angry about the current state of American government.

Putting stock in people’s perceptions, even connected people, can be risky. But when DFLers are parroting Republican talking points about Franken and PC party insiders can’t get over the fact that he penned tacky jokes, you’ve got to think something is off the rails about his campaign. I mean, nobody likes Mike Hatch, or so you’d imagine from what people say, but I never heard this kind of friendly fire during his run for Guv.

Either I misread Franken and, though smart and articulate, he’s a mean, sullen SOB. Or he has been victim of one of the most effective disinformation campaigns in state political history. Or we are an electorate who still, after eight years of George Bush, would rather elect the affable slippery character over the smart guy who couldn’t sell you a broom after a dust storm.

I suspect it’s a mixture of at least two. I just don’t know which.

The Franken campaign has to start showing the world the Al Franken I saw moved to tears when he spoke about the troops in Iraq. The guy who makes gratis USO Tours all over the globe. The guy whose passion for a just society lead him to give up a lucrative media career and depart his adopted hometown. The quirky ads from his ex-teacher and the tit-for-tat nonsense with Coleman aren’t helping.

And he needs to find a way, in a year when voters are supposedly craving authenticity and consistency in candidates, to show voters how wildly all over the map Norm Coleman is. I am a moderate pragmatist who would love to see such people in office. Norm Coleman would like us to believe he is such a guy, but watching his ideological gyrations over the past couple decades, it’s clear he’s merely a pol with his finger to the wind.

As the Fair starts and the real campaign season begins, Al Franken has failed in framing his opponent and defining his own legitimacy to voters. Norm Coleman should have been one of the most vulnerable incumbents this year. Time is running out.