(Wikipedia)

(Wikipedia)

Norm Coleman was compared — unfavorably, as I read it — to Richard Nixon in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Reporter Matt Bai writes that when Nixon foresaw a trouncing in 1960 he “exited quickly to begin plotting his return to office.” Not so with Coleman, whose concession holdout in the Minnesota Senate race now has spanned four meteorological seasons. But Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert takes issue with how favorable Bai’s take on Coleman’s delay is.

One section of Bai’s piece that Boehlert cites [emphasis his]:

Even before he ran for re-election to the Senate, Norm Coleman saw more than his share of ignominious elections. First he lost the Minnesota governorship to a former pro wrestler who called himself the Body. Then he just barely managed to wrest a Senate seat from an opponent, Paul Wellstone, who had recently perished in a plane crash. So can you really blame Coleman for having spent the last eight months furiously trying not to have to concede defeat to Al Franken – a man who once acted alongside a gorilla on the set of “Trading Places”?

“[D]oes anybody think that if Coleman had lost to a Democratic candidate who was an attorney or an investment banker than Coleman wouldn’t have also pursued the same, losing delay strategy?” Boehlert asks. “Of course, not. But the press loves to point out how Franken’s just a comedian. Why? Because the Beltway press doesn’t take Franken seriously, which is one reason pundits and reporters have played dumb about Coleman’s extraordinary and unprecedented sore loser routine in 2009.”

What’s worse, writes Boehlert, is that the Times frames Coleman’s delay not as being a “sore loser” (a phrase we often heard applied to that other Al — Gore — in 2000) but as “the lengths to which losing candidates will now routinely go” (emphasis mine).

“Coleman’s not part of any larger cultural trend where politicians can no longer concede defeat,” Boehlert concludes. “Hundreds (thousands?) of them do it every election cycle in cities and states across the country. Coleman represents the radical exception, but the ’liberal media’ are too timid to call him out on it.”