Mercury Rising

Good for Al Franken! He's doing political judo, turning a political negative -- the fact that he's obviously Jewish while Norm Coleman is not, in a state with a long history of latent (if not blatant) anti-Semitism -- into a positive: >Feigning astonishment to hear that DFL candidates made gains in 2004 by stressing basic issues like education and health-care, liberal talk-radio host Al Franken blew in from New York City and entertained the DFL House caucus on a surprise visit Thursday. Franken recently took himself out of consideration for a 2006 Senate race but he's been telling his national listeners that he might establish residency in Minnesota soon and might be interested in running against Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in 2008, saying the he would be "the only New York Jew in the race who grew up in Minnesota." Ba-da-bing! The real beauty of this is that even if Franken doesn't run, comments like these will serve to remind the anti-Semitic contingent of the Minnesota Republican voting community that Norm Coleman isn't Irish like they thought he was. I know, I know: A lot of you readers that are shocked that Minnesota, a state with a very liberal reputation, could have been a hotbed of anti-Jewish sentiment in the recent past, and still have enough residual anti-Semitism to influence elections. But believe me, it's so. In 1990, Paul Wellstone challenged Rudy Boschwitz for Boschwitz' Senate seat. Boschwitz had a six-to-one money advantage, and was widely expected to crush the upstart Wellstone. But in the last weeks of the campaign, after having ignored Wellstone publicly for months and when he had a comfortable lead over the Democrat, Boschwitz suddenly pulled a truly stupid move: He, writing both as a Senator and as an observant Jew, wrote a letter to various prominent religiously-observant Minnesota Jews in which he attacked Wellstone for marrying outside the Jewish faith and allegedly not raising his children as Jews. This backfired in two ways. The first one has been well-publicized: Instead of turning the Jewish community against Wellstone, they rallied around him. The second effect was never mentioned in the local media, but it existed nonetheless. See, Rudy Boschwitz, unlike Paul Wellstone, was more outwardly "assimilated" -- that is, he didn't "look like a Jew", while Wellstone did. He habitually wore plaid flannel shirts and jeans for that folksy look that most Minnesotans didn't normally associate with "East Coast" Jews. This enabled him to fool a large chunk of the Minnesota GOP's notoriously racist and anti-Semitic (not to mention stupid) base, which is what got him elected in the first place. But when the letter came out, suddenly a lot of Minnesota Republicans -- including my own dear racist great-aunt -- were saying in shocked tones: "I didn't know Rudy Boschwitz was Jewish!" And quite a few of those voters, normally among the most reliable voters in the Minnesota Republican Party, found themselves staying home on Election Day. These two effects, taken together, erased Boschwitz' double-digit lead and gave it to Wellstone, which gave him the victory. Fast-forward fifteen years, to a similar situation. Norm Coleman is even more "assimilated" than Rudy Boschwitz, and he intends to stay that way. The chief Democratic opponent is a fellow Jew who does not try to hide his Jewishness. But Franken knows that Coleman won't risk invoking the second effect, so Al does it for him. That's political judo.

# posted by Phoenix Woman @ 2/25/2005 06:22:00 AM