Flawed Funnyman Franken Frustrated by Flip-Flopping Fool

It always strikes me funny when Minnesota goings-on make New York news, but it's even weirder when Minnesota politics makes Gawker.

Here's what they said:

"Poor comedian Al Franken should've won this, but a third party candidate took more of his votes than Coleman's (instant runoff voting, anyone? please?), and also he didn't run a very good campaign, and also Minnesotans, like many Americans, are in love with the idea of a divided government as some sort of good thing, because we all remember how well that worked in 1994, when the government shut down, as a stunt."

Norman Bertram Coleman, as some readers know, used to be a Brooklynite (moved to Minnesota after law school in Iowa), Jewish (no longer practicing), Married (his aspiring actress/model wife wanted an "open" marriage), and a Democrat (became mayor of St. Paul in 1993 as a Democrat and switched parties in 1996). Ironically, he was the Republican point man on accusing Kerry of flip-flopping.

Franken turned out to be surprisingly un-charismatic as a candidate. Running as a comedian seemed too Ventura-esque, so he started calling himself a "satirist" and stopped being funny. Consequently, he stopped being likeable. Or everyone realized he never really was that likeable in the first place. Still, he had to be better than Norman Bertram Coleman. Any Democrat would be.

What were Minnesotans thinking? How could the state that brought Obama 1,573,210 votes give Coleman a win? 1,211,435 people voted for Coleman -- just hundreds more than the 1.2 million that voted for Franken.

One way of looking at it -- as Gawker does -- is to blame the third party candidate, Dean Barkley. He actually had the job just before Coleman did. He's the guy Governor Ventura named as a temporary replacement when Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash two weeks before the 2004 Senate race.