AP cites one man who voted for neither to say state’s tired of Franken-Coleman war

AP source Jared Reise (in hat) with "Among the Oats" cast. Photo: MN Fringe Festival

It’s apparently hard for reporters to find an ordinary voter to comment on the extraordinary struggle over Minnesota’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. The latest example: The Associated Press cited one person — who didn’t vote for either Al Franken or Norm Coleman — in its story Monday about Minnesotans being “tired” of the Senate battle. Jared Riese turns out to be an unlikely but not entirely inapt electoral Everyman.

UPDATE: The AP talked to 24 voters for the story, writer Brian Bakst tells the Minnesota Independent, but national editors removed all but one. Most were indeed tired of it all, according to Bakst. Read an excerpt from the AP’s in-state version after the jump.   

The AP’s headline fooled Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post into seeing more than one voter quoted. He wrote in his blog, The Fix:

What’s clear is that the average Minnesotan is growing tired of the back and forth. The Associated Press penned a piece today entitled “Minnesota Senate race leaves voters tired of law drama” that featured a series of quotes from residents of the Land of 10,000 Lakes expressing their disinterest [sic] in the entire thing.

But despite the headline, the AP story contains not a series of quotes but a single quote from one average Minnesotan:

Some Minnesotans, like actor Jared Reise, are past caring who wins and just want the state to regain its second senator.

“This is a very important time to have everybody there, with the way the economy is,” said Reise, of suburban Eagan, who didn’t vote for either man on Nov. 4. “It’s a little long-winded, this whole recount.”

UPDATE: Bakst tells MnIndy by e-mail that Riese said he voted for Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley. He was one of two dozen randomly selected people whom the AP’s Liz Riggs interviewed in downtown Minneapolis. Here’s an excerpt from the fuller version of their AP story:

Meanwhile, voters are losing patience.

“Enough is enough,” said legal secretary Julianne Hill, a Franken voter from St. Bonifacius. “I think there’s been plenty of review and plenty diligence and I think it’s time for Coleman to give it up.”

None of several Coleman voters interviewed by The Associated Press would speak for attribution. While some were ready to move on, one was adamant that her candidate take it to the bitter end.

It’s not the first time that an “average voter” quoted in a widely circulated story about the Minnesota Senate dispute has turned out to be other than average. Christina Capecchi, writing for The New York Times last November, didn’t reveal that her “ordinary voter,” who voiced concerns about where Al Franken’s votes came from, was really a veteran Republican operative who had served on former U.S. Sen. Rod Grams’ campaign and Senate staffs, run as a GOP candidate himself, and been named in a Franken campaign-practices complaint.

But the AP story raises a different question: Can a man who never had a dog in the Coleman-Franken fight speak to the tiredness felt by the nearly 3 million Minnesotans who did vote for one candidate or the other? Probably not. But although he’s far from average, Jared Reise, it turns out, brings a lot to the Everyman role in which the AP cast him.

Reise appears from his blog to be a thoughtful guy who’s almost past caring about more than the Senate contest. He wonders after a dozen years in and out of the Twin Cities theater scene whether calling himself an actor is worth it. He tells his temp agency to “cram it.”

And he throws himself into presenting an absurdist play about three men stuck in oatmeal together that could be a metaphor for the Senate contest if you remember Independence Party runner-up Dean Barkley.  A well-liked if ill-attended entry in last year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival, “Among the Oats” (video) left the actual oats to the audience’s imagination. But the play’s bickering is as real as what the Coleman and Franken camps do in court every day — and one of the actors even manages to threaten to take their dispute to the Supreme Court.