Tom Horner

Independence Party gubernatorial candidate Tom Horner got a double dose of good news over the weekend. The Star Tribune’s editorial board wrote a glowing opinion of Horner’s candidacy, and though it stopped short of endorsing him, the paper left little to the imagination as to who the paper will pick for Nov. 2. Then, this morning, former Gov. Arne Carlson endorsed Horner’s candidacy.

“Independence Party candidate Tom Horner ranks as a serious contender, and he deserves full consideration by Minnesotans who in more ordinary times might not look at a third-party candidate,” the Strib’s editorial board wrote. “That’s especially true of those who value a more centrist, pragmatic approach to governing than has so far been offered up by the GOP and DFL candidates.”

The paper says that the GOP’s Tom Emmer is too far to the right and the DFL’s Mark Dayton is too far to the left.

On the paper’s news side, reporter Baird Helgeson notes that some business leaders who would have backed a GOP candidate in the past are lining up behind Horner. As Helgeson notes, many who would have ordinarily backed Emmer — and who backed Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s two runs for the office — are finding Emmer too extreme or are concerned about his lack of details in addressing Minnesota’s massive budget deficit.

“For the first time in my life, I have not blindly supported the Republican candidate for governor,” said Tom Merickel, a vice president with Taylor Corp. told the Star Tribune. “There’s nothing wrong with electing the most qualified person to be governor. If it means stepping away, momentarily, from the Republican Party, then so be it.”

MinnPost’s Doug Grow notes that the paper didn’t know until the last minute that both pieces would appear in the paper at the same time because of the separation between news and opinion parts of the paper.

Monday morning brought news that Carlson, who governed as a Republican, is throwing his weight behind Horner. The duo will travel to St. Cloud, Rochester and St. Paul today to spread the announcement Carlson first made on KARE-11 Sunrise. He believes Horner is the best candidate to help the state out of its economic woes and said the state’s deficit is the result of years of bad fiscal mismanagement in Minnesota government.

“If you believe, as I do, that our problems are too large and the other candidates too extreme to be trusted with the future of the state, this election demands we take another path,” Carlson said in a statement.

In backing Republican Coleman’s constitutional arguments, the WSJ recycles its earlier warning about Minnesota being another Florida (a la 2000′s Bush v. Gore recount fiasco) and tosses in more geographic name-calling for good measure:

And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt. Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota.

The Bemidji Pioneer likewise leans Coleman’s way (the paper endorsed him in 1998, 2002 and 2008) but is ready with strong medicine for the former senator about accepting Democrat Al Franken’s election:

Sen. Coleman’s appeals were necessary and a legal part of the process. But at some point, incessant appeals serve no more than to obstruct the process than to guarantee justice. … The public perception at this point appears not to be one of letting Sen. Coleman fully seek redress of his legal grievances, but rather one of obstructing the Democrat-controlled Senate to prevent it from reaching that magic number of 60 votes. … To continue to obstruct doesn’t bode well for Minnesota, nor for Sen. Coleman’s career, should he continue in politics. It’s time to come home, Norm.

Interestingly, the Pioneer sees the process breaking against both men:

At this point, we seriously doubt the credibility of either Sen. Coleman or Mr. Franken to have a productive Senate tenure for the remaining 5½ years — which could become less should Sen. Coleman continue to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could decide not to hear the case until it convenes in October after a summer break.

The word “credibility” is suddenly popping up in the Coleman-Franken fracas just as the tips of tulips are breaking through the chilly Minnesota soil. Coleman himself used it while holding court with the Star Tribune editorial board:

No matter who wins, one side is going to pound the other side and question the credibility of the winner. If I win, I’ll be shot at by those who say, “Is he legitimate?”

Coleman’s comment, posted and published over the weekend, is in tune with this statement from the same session, released by the Strib last week: “We will never know who won.”

According to the tally kept at MinnPost’s Braublog, newspaper editorials now stand at — you guessed it — a tie, for and against Coleman’s imminent appeal to the state Supreme Court. That’s not counting such out-of-state interlopers as the WSJ, the New York Times, the Las Vegas Sun and the Jamestown (S.D.) Sun.