Photo: The UpTake

Photo: The UpTake

“It takes bulldog courage to overcome obstacles,” Norm Coleman told Minnesota Republicans Saturday. “Bite hard and don’t let go.” That could be the motto for his ongoing legal challenge to results showing Democrat Al Franken defeated him in last year’s race for the U.S. Senate. “It’s not going to take a miracle for me to win this race,” Coleman said. “It’s going to take justice on the part of the Minnesota Supreme Court.” Video after the jump.

The state’s high court is expected to rule as early as Monday on Coleman’s appeal of a lower-court decision that he indeed lost. Coleman contended that counting uncounted ballots and un-counting double-counted ballots will make him the winner.

The former senator was speaking at a GOP State Central Committee meeting that saw business owner Tony Sutton elected chair and rightwing blogger Michael Brodkorb vice chair.

Retiring chair Ron Carey introduced Coleman by saying the party had spent almost $1.5 million since Election Day to help him regain his Senate seat.

That was money well-spent, according to Coleman: “I’m confident that when all the votes are counted, I’m going to be returning to the United States Senate.”

The stakes are high, Coleman said, in a Senate where Franken’s arrival would bring Democrats the 60th vote they need for a filibuster-proof majority. One vote, he said, will make the difference “between people possibly losing the right to a secret ballot [in union elections]” and “a potential slippery slope” to government control of health care.

As if an example of one vote’s worth were needed after the microscopic margin in the Minnesota Senate contest, Franken offered the words of Chief Justice John Roberts. Coleman said Roberts thanked him after becoming the nation’s top justice because, “if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here.” Roberts was recalling Coleman’s victory in 2002 making a majority of 51 Republican senators who confirmed Roberts for his previous post on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals, Coleman said.

A lot of Coleman’s speech was a rehash of remarks he made last week during the Conservative Leadership Heartland Conference in St. Louis, where he endorsed use of “the ethernet” and “grass e-roots.” He contrasted features he sees as characteristic of the Obama era — tax-and-spend governance, coddling of dictators, wanting to be liked rather than respected — with what Republicans and Americans want.

“This election was about change [but] people didn’t want to change America. They wanted America to change Washington,” Coleman said — with the foreign-policy corollary that Republicans “want the world to be more like America, not the other way around.”

Coleman counseled Obama: “Don’t toss Israel … under the bus.”

And sometimes, perhaps due to a rapid-fire speaking style in which he sometimes seems to be interrupting himself, he made a nonsensical hash of his own rhetoric: “Debt as a percentage of GDP has increased ten-fold over Obama.”

Coleman ended by urging Republicans to follow Obama’s example in inspiring people to action, as he said the Democrat had done with voters’ hatred of the war in Iraq. Employing another adage that he perhaps wishes were true in his own race, Coleman pronounced that “whoever wants this the most is going to prevail.”

Here’s the video of Coleman’s speech, via The UpTake: