Publicly, at least, Minnesota Republicans say they're looking forward to running against Al Franken, star of television and radio, darling of the Hollywood left. "I would love to see Al Franken in rural Minnesota standing in the cornfields with farmers and talking to them about farming and agriculture prices when he's spent the last 20 years in New York City in a very elite, sort of liberal environment," Minnesota's Republican Party chairman, Ron Eibensteiner, says. "Minnesotans experimented with a comedian-type unprofessional public servant with Jesse Ventura, and it didn't work out very well."

Former Gov. Ventura is no Franken fan, either. "People love to compare themselves to what I did. They did it with Schwarzenegger in California. He's just another Republican," says Ventura, who in 1998 stunned the Minnesota political establishment by winning the state governorship as a Reform Party candidate, with a mix of brazen speak and grass-roots realpolitik. "You have to remember something -- I took on two endorsed candidates of the Democratic and Republican powerhouses, Humphrey and Coleman, and defeated them. Al Franken would be just another Democrat."

Ventura makes a couple of good points: Unlike Ventura, Franken doesn't currently live in Minnesota, and he hasn't held elected office. (Ventura was the mayor of Minnesota's sixth largest city.) And Norm Coleman, Ventura notes, is no pushover. "Coleman is savvy. He's spun well. He's in very tight with President Bush," Ventura says. "The moment [Franken] declares his candidacy, he has to go off the radio. He has to look forward to having his entire past exposed. He'd better come clean and be honest with it. If he's done drugs in the past, he better be honest about that. He better be honest about things he did at Harvard, if he has anything in the closet," because, Ventura emphasizes, Coleman is "going to have the Republican machine behind him 110 percent."

Coleman wasn't always the darling of the right. He used to be a Democrat, but after one term as the mayor of St. Paul, Coleman switched parties in 1997. "The cities, St. Paul and Minneapolis, are as Democratic as you are going to get," University of Minnesota political scientist Lawrence Jacobs explains. "I mean San Francisco Democratic." But Coleman still won reelection in 1997, becoming the first Republican mayor of St. Paul since 1960. In 1998, he lost the gubernatorial race to Ventura by three percentage points. But a year later, he picked up an important ally: George W. Bush. He went from serving as the state party chair of Bill Clinton's candidacy in 1996 to heading George W. Bush's Minnesota campaign in 2000. It was President Bush who asked Coleman to run for Senate in 2002. Vice President Dick Cheney then pressured Coleman's Republican opponent to step aside. Coleman coasted through the primary, only to face liberal icon Paul Wellstone.

Despite the high-level GOP support, he was trailing Wellstone until the progressive icon died in a plane crash 11 days before the election. With the Democratic Party in turmoil, former Vice President and two-term Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale was asked to step in. Quickly, Mondale took the lead. And just as quickly, the political momentum shifted, especially after a raucous Wellstone memorial service (Sen. Trent Lott and other Republicans who attended were booed) was depicted by conservatives in the media as an example of Democratic excess and dysfunction not seen since the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

To Franken, who attended the funeral and memorial service, it was Coleman who capitalized on the death of Wellstone, and the media firestorm that followed. It is this same political opportunism, Franken says, that motivated Coleman to call for United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to step down at the close of 2004. Coleman made national headlines by stating that Annan was ultimately responsible for corruption in the Oil for Food Program. "It was grandstanding," Franken says. "I mean, there was no evidence of any wrongdoing; the secretary general didn't administer the program. It was mainly administered by the Security Council, the United States and Great Britain. So I thought it was a cynical indictment of a man trying to get on TV." After repeated efforts, Coleman declined to comment for this story.

Even some nonpartisan observers insist Franken will have a hard time unseating Coleman. "Al Franken is a comedian," Jacobs says. "He hasn't lived in the state for a number of years. Why do we take it seriously apart from the fact that this guy creates a scene?" Jacobs doubts that Minnesotans are ready to send a comic to the Senate, where despite the vitriol of modern politics -- even as the "nuclear option" looms -- senators refer to bitter partisan foes as "gentlewoman," "good friend," "distinguished." "You have to be very cautious as a candidate in what you say and how you say it," Jacobs points out. "Where's the record of Al Franken doing that? The one-liners don't work in politics; they really turn people off."

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