(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.”

The pair was working on a piece about the trafficking of women for the online video news site and weren’t aware that they crossed the border into North Korea, they said. While American officials work “feverishly” (according to ABC News) in an effort to secure their release, Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent tracks down what a “labor camp” sentence means. From the State Department’s 2008 Human Rights Report:

Reeducation through labor, primarily through sentences at forced labor camps, was a common punishment and consisted of tasks such as logging, mining, or tending crops under harsh conditions. Reeducation involved memorizing speeches by Kim Jong-il…

If the pair are dubbed political prisoners, they may face harsher conditions, including “prolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.”

The same report underscores the importance of Lee’s and Ling’s work exposing trafficking of women across the border with China:

There were no known laws specifically addressing the problem of trafficking in persons, and trafficking of women and young girls into and within China continued to be widely reported. Some North Korean women and girls who voluntarily crossed into China were picked up by trafficking rings and sold as brides to Chinese nationals or placed in forced labor. In other cases, North Korean women and girls were lured out of North Korea by the promise of food, jobs, and freedom, only to be forced into prostitution, marriage, or exploitive labor arrangements. A network of smugglers facilitated this trafficking. Many victims of trafficking, unable to speak Chinese, were held as virtual prisoners, and some were forced to work as prostitutes. Traffickers sometimes abused or physically scarred the victims to prevent them from escaping. Officials facilitated trafficking by accepting bribes to allow individuals to cross the border into China.

The Obama administration would like to keep the journalists’ cause separate from bargaining over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, but many fear the country will use the case as leverage. Word is Obama is considering sending former Vice President Al Gore (founder of Current.com) or New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to Pyongyang to negotiate for the duo’s release.

Photo: Duke Law

Republican attorney Ben Ginsberg is helping usher Norm Coleman’s equal-protection claims to a high court (Minnesota’s), just as he did with another client, George W. Bush, and another high court (the United States’) eight years ago. Indeed, Coleman’s yet-to-be submitted brief is expected to cite Bush vs. Gore, as have his earlier briefs presented (unsuccessfully) to the state Supreme Court and the election-contest court. Maybe there’s a reason for that. In 2006, Ginsberg admitted to a law school audience:

Just like, really, with the Voting Rights Act, Republicans have some fundamental philosophical difficulties with the whole notion of Equal Protection.

I dipped into the video of Ginsberg’s hourlong talk in 2006 at Duke University School of Law, and found a few other snippets of interest.

Like Al Gore, Ginsberg was a reporter before going to law school and getting involved in politics and government (at the 6:15 mark):

My first job out of college was an internship on the Boston Globe in the summer of 1974, which was noteworthy not only for Watergate which was completely immaterial to my life, but for the summer that they started forced busing in Boston — an interesting notion of a government example of a program applied to real life. … I had red hair and so the guys who ran the Boston Globe assumed I was Irish and stuck me on the streets of South Boston to cover the riots in the neighborhoods. And that was kind of an eye-opening experience, in terms of government and people and well-intentioned programs that maybe don’t work quite exactly right. Which provided sort of an analytical tool for the rest of — I mean, I got searing memories of things from watching an experience like that take place.

About his first recount, in Indiana in 1984 (11:31):

Republicans lost that recount. The Democrats in the House of Representatives decided that they just had to have one more seat to try and put Republicans in their place. I remain convinced to this day it was a stolen election. It turned out being by four votes. It was in restrospect the event that galvanized a very sleepy Republican minority in the House of Representatives into taking a slightly more militant approach to politics in the House of Representatives. One of the people who at the time in 1984 was just a back bencher but was thoroughly outraged by all this was one Newt Gingrich, who took that feeling that Republicans in the House had and pressed it into a real change of attitude that ultimately I think led to the Republican takeover in the House in 1994.

As counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee, Ginsberg came to Minnesota for the 1986 recount between incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Arlan Stangeland and his DFL challenger (then unsuccessful, now U.S. Rep.) Collin Peterson (13:54):

After two years there was another recount — and recounts really do change lives — there was another recount, in Minnesota, that I participated in. Low and behold, the Minnesota senator [Rudy Boschwitz] who put a lot of people into that House recount to help his colleague was taking over as the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They asked me if I wanted to do that job … so I went over to the Senate for two years.

Ginsberg on his successful 1989 interview to work for the Republican National Committee (15:25):

There is the great Lee Atwater with his feet propped up on a desk, with a book of Great Grade B Movies of Our Time that he’s reading. And he goes, “Well, I kinda know you. What I really want to know is what you think of Pia Zadora.” … So Atwater and I spent 20 minutes talking about Pia Zadora and John Waters movies.

At the time Ginsberg made this speech, the fact that courts hadn’t yet cited Bush vs. Gore as precedent was a point of pride, and proof that the ruling hadn’t done damage (39:50):

Of course Bush vs. Gore is probably the most notorious election-law cases that’s ever gone up to the (U.S.) Supreme Court. We did include equal protection as one of the core arguments in that case, and it was somewhat contentious as an issue as the justices talked about it. … At the time, people were —  the commentators were very adamant that it would set a terrible precedent for the future and really did harmful things to the Supreme Court as an institution. At the end of the day, Bush vs. Gore has not been cited as precedent, or binding precedent, in any case in the four years since then. And I don’t think you can credibly make the argument that the U.S. Supreme Court has lost any of its moral force because of that case. And so George Bush became president and that indeed becomes kind of the mother of all cases.

Here’s Boehlert sampling from what he says were 900 sore-loser media mentions for Gore in 2000:

“By energetically pressing that point, Republicans said they hoped to convey that Mr. Bush’s ascent to the White House was inevitable — and that sore losers in the vice president’s camp were trying to steal the election from him.” [The New York Times, 11/9/2000]

“Mr. Bush’s advisers accused the Gore campaign of playing fast and loose with the facts of the disputed vote in Florida, and they came to a news conference here armed with voter registration statistics, visual aids and pointed implications that Vice President Al Gore and his allies were acting like sore losers.” [The New York Times, 11/10/2000]

“In announcing that they would contest election results in Miami-Dade County (and perhaps elsewhere) in court, as allowed under Florida law, Mr. Gore’s lawyers risked making Mr. Gore look, at least in legal terms, like the one thing he had struggled for days not to be seen as: a sore loser.” [The New York Times, 11/24/2000]

“In blunt, often brutal language reminiscent of the rhetoric aimed at President Clinton during his impeachment and trial, Gore is portrayed as a win-at-any-cost sore loser with a penchant for lying and a death wish for his party.” [The Washington Post, 11/30/2000]

“Republicans are already undertaking a public relations counteroffensive that will portray Gore as the ultimate sore loser.” [The Washington Post, 11/27/2000]

He doesn’t say exactly how many times Coleman’s been called “sore loser,” but a quick search of the Lexis database shows a couple dozen occurrences at the most — fewer if you count only major media. (Several “sore losers” appear in conservative contexts, with real or implied quotation marks around the epithet.)

And the list leaves out the clever “Sore Loserman“ subvertisement for “Gore-Lieberman.”

Granted, Franken’s presence now in Minnesota might not be necessary or even helpful. But his absence uncomfortably recalls Al Gore’s fiddling while George W. Bush’s forces burned through Florida during the 2000 presidential recount. Shouldn’t Al be here, if for no other reason than to make use of his USO chops to rally the troops from behind the front lines? But perhaps Franken went to D.C. for another reason altogether.

Franken has just learned a very hard lesson in how every single vote matters. Perhaps he took it upon himself to travel across the country to cast a provisional ballot in the Senate Democrats’ vote this morning on whether to strip U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., of his committee chairmanship. (It wouldn’t have made a difference after all — Lieberman won handily.) After all, Lieberman helped Coleman during the campaign, so a Franken “no” vote would only have been returning the favor. And Franken wouldn’t want to risk a homemade absentee ballot, mailed from Minnesota, getting improperly rejected.

OK, didn’t happen — as far as we know. But crazier things have been done and said. Franken’s tangled fortunes with Lieberman — the Dems’ hopes for 60 Senate votes rides on both their backs — go back at least as far as the simpler times of 2000, when each man joked about a Franken-Lieberman presidential ticket.