The 23-second video, entitled “Hilarious Encounters 3,” catches Coleman as he traverses a big-box retail store’s parking lot. The clip’s charm is in the audio, as the videographer and a companion in a parked car practically ululate with delight at their sighting:

Oh my gosh, it’s Norm Coleman! … You’re going on YouTube, dude. … Where is he? … Dad will run into him. … It’s Norm! Oh gosh!

The video’s description provides context: “Waiting for dad at Joe’s Sporting Goods, and look who we see. LOL”

Coleman, out of office since January, fully relinquished his hold on his old Senate seat in June, when he called a halt to court challenges to Sen. Al Franken’s 312-vote victory. Coleman vowed to do a lot of fishing (supplies for which he may have been seeking at Joe’s) and to mull over entering the 2010 race for governor of Minnesota.

All the while, Coleman has been offering opinions about the future of the GOP and of fellow Republicans like Gov. Tim Pawlenty, while remaining circumspect about his own plans.

Attracting young people via social media outlets like YouTube is key to the party’s growth, Coleman has said. ”Hilarious Encounters 3″ is Exhibit A that Coleman can elicit enthusiasm in people too young to buy 8-track tapes, without even worrying about that old “ethernet.”

Franken also appeals to amateur paparazzi. In the throes of his recount ordeal last April, he played to the camera by planting a kiss on a picketer’s cheek on a rainy night in downtown Minneapolis.

Democrats won in 2008 due to their relative mastery of such “communication tools of the 21st century … despite our superior tickets and issues,” Coleman said last week.

Until today, YouTube documentation of Coleman’s remarks at the Conservative Heartland Leadership Conference in St. Louis last week was limited to two clips in which he extolled “the ethernet” as a new political tool and censored the word “shit” from a recitation of dialogue from the movie “City Slickers.”

Now comes Coleman’s full 30-minute keynote address to the traditional-values crowd, in three YouTube installments. Coleman addresses the “never-ending” contest with Al Franken in Part 1, Obama’s policies in Part 2, and the GOP’s tech-savvy gap in Part 3.

(A videographer who goes by the YouTube tag dsm0012 did yeoman service in handling an infant as well as a camera — evidenced by the gurgles and cries that punctuate Coleman’s speech. The sound of clattering cutlery in Part 1 dies down eventually, but Coleman’s casual New Yawk-by-way-of-Minnesota enunciation makes a full transcription of his remarks next to impossible.)

Here are the videos and some choice excerpts:

Part 1 of 3:

[Reciting his achievements as St. Paul mayor]  … Didn’t sign a proclamation making it  gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender month in St. Paul. … I didn’t think it was government’s role to sign proclamations! (2:15)

[About the 2008 senate race] I have been counting and recounting my blessings. … There were 100-something votes, 110 votes for Franken, particularly in Minneapolis, that were double-votes. More votes than voters in those precincts. That shouldn’t happen in America. And so we got our case before the Supreme Court, arguments on Monday. I’m still very, very confident the Supreme Court comes to the conclusion that whether your vote counts shouldn’t depend on where you live. … They admittedly come from strong Republican areas. That’s because Democratic areas are already counted! So I’ve got 4,000 votes that we hope the court says, “Count the votes!” They count the votes, we’ll live with the outcome. We’re waiting, we’re waiting. I’m a man of great faith.  (4:50)

We are at the headwaters of something very powerful in this country. The first lines of the next chapter are being written at gatherings like this — and at tea parties. Connections being made among like-minded people all across America … (8:35)

Part 2 of 3:

By the way, we won the war in Iraq. (0:25)

[Listing Obama's flaws] … A foreign policy predicated on wanting to be liked rather than being respected. (1:25)

The president and his education friends say, ‘Let’s use our kids as guinea pigs in radical social experiments in our schools.’ (5:45)

Part 3 of 3:

We need to cultivate our grass e-roots. Grass e-roots. I heard a little bit about that discussed this morning. That’s spelled Grass-space-e-hyphen-roots. We have a new [unintelligible] in American politics called grass e-roots. In this new world, the one with the most cell phone numbers, e-mail addressses and YouTube hits wins. Despite the fact that we had superior tickets and issues in November, we never caught up on the Democrats on the ability to raise funds fast and cheap, and communicate with millions of people in milliseconds. Door-knocking and direct mailing still have a role but e-politics is the name of the game and we have to learn it. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, online social targeting. Conservatives need to manage the communication tools of the 21st century. …

[Describes Obama's grasp of high-tech] Imagine what we could do with similar technology, good leaders and ideas … People always say to me, ‘How do you win over the young people?’ I say, look at the generation today. Anybody with young kids today, I’ve got a 23-year-old, an 18-year-old daughter, 23-year-old son. Wherever they are, they control their universe. They’re masters of their universe. [They ] Facebook, [the?] MySpace. My daughter graduated from high school, she said, ‘Mom, you don’t have to write out invitations. But there’s something right here. I got all my friends right here.’ Course, we sent out invitations anyway. They want to travel, they don’t call a travel agent. They go on, what? Expedia or something else. And they figure it out themselves. When they want music, they don’t buy albums, they don’t buy 8-tracks, they probably don’t even buy CDs anymore. They’re picking out individual songs, one by one. Choice, controlling your destiny. (1:45)

Here are the first YouTube videos to emerge from Coleman’s trip to St. Louis Thursday for the Conservative Heartland Leadership Conference.

In this one, a sympathetic videographer catches up with Coleman in the ballroom for a quick interview. Coleman — whose campaign Website left donors’ personal financial data exposed earlier this year — says the key for Republicans is to compete “in the ethernet”:

Coleman delivers his “City Slickers” dialogue in this clip from his keynote speech (the “hypocrite” line is at the end):

And here’s the scene from “City Slickers” Coleman tried to replicate:

Coleman’s telling has Billy Crystal asking Jack Palance, “What’s the meaning of life?” Palance, playing the character Curly, holds up one finger. “Your finger?” asks Crystal. “No,” replies Palance. “One thing. Do that and your life will make sense.”

Palance’s actual line: “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit.”

Coleman might have simply been mixed up — in an op-ed this year, he misattributed a saying to Hubert Humphrey.

Either way, the line he dropped has a certain resonance with the most incriminating line attributed to his friend and benefactor Nasser Kazeminy in pending civil suits that allege Kazeminy funneled cash to Coleman: “United States Senators don’t make shit.”

Note: Minnesota Public Radio has audio of Coleman’s remarks to reporters Thursday.