In the End, What Doomed Norm Coleman Was His Leftward Drift

It’s all over but for the shouting and the randomly-fired futile lawsuit in Minnesota, where the human bag of grease and phlegm Al Franken will be that state’s newest Senator. He beat Republican Norm Coleman, who still has to be wondering what in the heck happened that let the unfunniest human being in the multiverse whose most recent job involved crashing an entire radio network into the side of Mount Failure beat him?

Scott Johnson, Power Liner extraordinaire and Minnesota lawyer has a very good article at NRO on just what has happened since Election Day. The short answer is that Franken’s campaign team just out-hustled Coleman’s at every opportunity. Johnson says that there really weren’t any Franken shenanigans, as had been thought by many folks including me and the Wall Street Journal.

The real question isn’t how Franken won the many and varied recounts but how he was ever close enough to merit one. Coleman, Johnson says, was “an outstanding senator” but he couldn’t have been that outstanding or he would have mopped the floor with Franken.

I think the reason Coleman lost is the same reason every Republican in Congress loses: he got elected on conservative principles then drifted left. As we’ve seen, election after election, when the public has a choice between a fake Democrat and a real one, they choose the real one every time. Republicans keep proving that and Coleman wasn’t nearly clever enough to escape what’s proving to be an immutable law of elections (well, unless you’re in Maine).

To test my theory, I went to the ratings provided by the American Conservative Union. The group picks 25 pieces of legislation, compares the lawmaker’s votes to its own position, and gives them a numeric rating based on how often they agree with the conservative position. A perfectly conservative score is 100 and perfectly progressive one is 0. Someone with a 50 rating is pretty much a random flag flopping in the wind. Most conservative Senators hover in the mid or high 80s. Maverick de tutti Mavericki John McCain has pinballed between the mid to low 60s and 80 since 2000.

Where has Coleman placed? Well, he started out on the ragged edge of the Reagan Line but it didn’t take him but a couple years before he started diving left. Last year, his rating was closer to the left-wing mark of perfection than he was to the conservatives.

2003: 80
2004: 84
2005: 64
2006: 68
2007: 64
2008: 48

If you really want to know why he lost, there it is. The voting public knows when someone turns out not to be who they said they were. Minnesota elected Coleman because he had been a fiscal conservative pretty much his entire career. When they realized what they really had was kind of sort of maybe a good fiscal guy but not really, they went back and got themselves another super-liberal. If Coleman had stuck to what got him elected in the first place,

Let this be a lesson to the rest of the Senate, and anyone considering running as a Republican in 2010. Conservatives win elections and left-leaning Republicans can be beaten by someone as pathetic as Al Franken.

UPDATE: Linked by Ace’s magnificent news sidebar!

Tags: Al Franken, Conservatives, Norm Coleman