Franken's best hope is for Obama to be the nominee and Pawlenty not to be the GOP VP.

Obama crushes McCain in MN (whereas Clinton loses) according to recent polls.

While his campaign hasn't gotten much visibility outside of MN (I don't know how much it's gotten inside MN, either), I think he's been quite serious about it

Like I said -it was an impression and that's because I suspect, like you said, not much is reported outside of Minnesota.

I'm very glad to read your comment. It's been hard from here to tell just how serious he is. I want him to be serious and I'm glad to read this comment.

Al Franken is very serious. He is an excellent campaigner.

I met him at a large event and had an opportunity to ask him a question while he was out working the crowd. He took all the time required to answer my question, and listening to my responses, while reaching out and shaking hands of those passing by. Al is one of those people who, in one-to-one sitiations, is able to make each person feel like the most important person to him at the time.

In his speech he warmed the crowd with his self-deprecating humor and then he had the audience completely quiet and attentive as he listed the issues and solution important to his campaign.

Al is passionate about this campaign and will do just fine against Norm Coleman.

Garrison Keillor's latest column has a great reference to Coleman, which addresses the point josephcast made about his unwillingness to hold Bush accountable on war profiteering:

"In Minnesota, a man is up for reelection who sat on a Senate committee with oversight responsibility for the rebuilding effort in Iraq and who showed no keen interest in the billions of dollars disappearing down rat holes. He is now starting to recover some memory."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/05/21/memorial_day/

Slimy Norman Quimby simply has to go. The only reason he's in the Senate at all is that Paul Wellstone's plane crashed. Did anyone else notice how he kept popping up every single day to remind us that he wasn't campaigning during the mourning period? Oily, self-serving little piece of shite...

And I, too, had heard the rumors of Laurie Coleman's facial contusions. And Norman is a skirt-hound of the first order. Someone needs to follow the guy with a camera. Or three. He is truly a festering pustule on the hindquarters of the human race.

Can somebody dig up those two open letters that Keillor wrote shortly after Coleman took office? Coleman dared to compare himself to Wellstone and Keillor just ripped into him. Keillor in the last 2 election cycles has quietly campaigned for a lot of local Dems. He has often appeared at local rallies and fund raisers for the candidates.

On the one hand the whole GOP campaign has been to attack Franken. They've not talked about Coleman excpet to try to distance him from Bush. On the other hand, it's been working. Campaign coverage has been almost entirely about Franken, and not in terms of policy or how he campaigns, but about his taxes or something he wrote. Every so often the GOP brings up something potentially offensive, and the media treat it like a story. The one time something negative about Coleman came out, recent revelations that he is connected to DCI, the lobbyists for Burma, the Star Tribune article mixed that with Franken having written something adult for Playboy and Christine Hefner having help a fundraiser for Franken. These were treated like equally serious stories, so there's Franken's main problem in a nutshell.

I also noticed that Franken's fundraising messages were humorous enough to be worth reading, but otherwise he's seriously toned down the humor. I wonder if he's carried the attempt to be serious too far. In terms of the Wellstone-like inspiration factor, his intraparty opponent has more of it. Franken is the stronger policy wonk and that comes across in radio, but Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is the stronger public speaker. Both promised to abide by the party endorsement, and it's close enough that Franken was contacting every state convention delegate after the tax story came out.

Of course, we're talking so far about a campaign to become the DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor Party) candidate, not a general election campaign. It's mostly been blogs and party meetings so far, not commercials aimed at independents.