The New York Observer has a brutal deconstruction of Al Franken’s Senate candidacy in today’s edition. Reporter Steve Kornacki compares the Democrat’s campaign to that of Oliver North, who lost a Senate race to scandal-plagued incumbent Chuck Robb in 1994 despite it being a landslide year for Republicans. Here’s the takeaway:

Now, 14 years later, it’s the Democrats of Minnesota who seem poised to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in just the same style.

Norm Coleman, a Republican who was elected to the Senate in something of a fluke in 2002, is up for re-election. The state, which has voted Democratic in the last eight presidential elections (the longest current streak in the nation), played footsy with the G.O.P. for a few years earlier this decade but has lately rejected Bush-ism and returned to its Democratic roots. The party overwhelmingly won an open Senate seat in 2006 and Barack Obama has enjoyed mostly robust leads in polling.

Meanwhile, Coleman, whose narrow ’02 win owed itself to that year’s national G.O.P. tide and the peculiar politics surrounding the funeral of Paul Wellstone (which Democrats were accused of turning into a political rally) has suffered for his close association with George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and the national Republican Party. He’s hardly a beloved figure in Minnesota, his approval ratings have sagged for several years now, and a Democratic tide every bit as powerful as the one seen in 2006 is shaping up at the Congressional level this fall. In a year when they are poised to compete in some of the most reliably Republican areas in the country, Coleman’s seat should be one of the ripest pick-up opportunities on the board for Democrats.

And yet, barely more than three months from the finish line, Coleman is poised to buck the same odds that Robb did in 1994 – and he owes it all to Minnesota’s Democrats, who have, just like Virginia’s Republican 14 years ago, picked the one candidate capable of squandering the enormous built-in advantages that their party enjoys.

That would be Al Franken, the former Saturday Night Live writer and performer and Air America host, who returned to his native Minnesota a few years ago with an eye on Coleman’s Senate seat. As a public figure, Franken is proving to be about as polarizing as North – although, obviously, for very different reasons. (Franken has never stood accused of coordinating the illicit sale of weapons to Iran, transferring the resulting profits to an illegal war in Central America, or even of lying to Congress).

 

Hat tip: The Political Animal