Baggage-O-Rama

On the same day Senator Hillary Clinton suspended her presidential campaign, urging her 18 million supporters to suck it up and vote for Barack Obama in November (though not always convincingly), Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party were having their convention in Rochester.

On the first ballot, they chose to endorse satirist and radio talk show host Al Franken as their U.S. Senate candidate. He easily defeated (to the surprise of many) Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, a college professor attempting to emulate Paul Wellstone, minus the charisma and the rundown bus. Guess all that Hollywood money Franken racked up couldn't be ignored.

Franken wants to make his campaign about Republican Senator Norm Coleman's ties to President George W. Bush, and his lack of empathy toward the common man and woman. Unfortunately for Franken, he left behind a paper trail of tax problems, sexually explicit magazine articles and tasteless jokes about women from his years at Saturday Night Live for the GOP to drive a truck through. Even some DFLers held their noses as they were voting for him. That's why Franken was compelled to apologize to the delegates for those past misdeeds in his acceptance speech.

Meanwhile, Senator Coleman has been positioning himself as a uniter, aligning with Democrats on some issues, though he voted with his own party most of the time. He's also astute enough to figure out that Bush's approval ratings have tanked in Minnesota (and most everywhere else), so he's pushing himself away from the President for that reason.

Franken also has a problem with his stand on the war in Iraq. One reason Clinton did not win the Democratic nomination is because of her early support of the war, then reversing herself when it became politically expedient to do so. Franken did much the same thing. Coleman, on the other hand, has supported the war from the beginning.

Al Franken, after a lifetime of making jokes for a living, now wants to be taken seriously in his bid for the Senate. Norm Coleman, after a lifetime of being a political chameleon, wants another six years to prove he can be something other than a party hack. Threatening to upset the apple cart is former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, who could announce his candidacy on Larry King Live if he felt like it. If he did, he could win over two uninspiring candidates.