The Star Tribune splashes what it calls Norm Coleman’s “never-ending image duel against Democrat [Al] Franken” across most of its front page today — contrasting the former Republican senator’s daily presence at the Senate election trial in St. Paul with Franken’s “weeklong vacation in balmy Key West.” The election contest is Coleman’s doing — it was Coleman, not Franken, who challenged the recount results, which necessitated the trial — but the story frames that fact as spin from a Franken campaign out to blame Coleman for dragging things out. And the Strib doesn’t mention the other key difference between the rival candidates: Coleman is a lawyer with years of experience as an assistant Minnesota attorney general who knows his way around a state courtroom. Franken is not.

Today’s spread amounts to the newspaper’s largest investment of front-page real estate in a celebrated public figure’s PR machinery since the Strib put a New York Times article about Angelina Jolie’s industrial-strength image-control efforts on its Nov. 21, 2008 cover. Even when the topic is less meta and more mundane, as with the brief rash of garage vandalism against multiple elected officials last fall, the Strib has shown a tendency to play Coleman’s plight most prominently in words, pictures and placement.