“I can’t change where we’ve been yesterday,” Coleman said, “but we can say starting from now that we reach agreement on this and that simply now we look forward and by looking forward ensure that only Minnesotans and only companies headquartered in Minnesota and individuals in Minnesota, that they’re the ones who decide who the next senator should be.”

Next election, locked in a tight battle in 2008 with current Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), he suddenly took down all his negative advertising and called on his opponent and all outside campaign committees to do the same. “At times like this, politics should not add to the negativity. It should lift people up with hope and a confident vision for the future,” he told the Star-Tribune.

Since helping found the American Action Network, however, Coleman’s been sounding a different tune. While the group was intended to serve largely as a policy shop to rival the liberal Center for American Progress, it has mainly just been cutting ads attacking Democrats (including Feingold) who are currently engaged in tight races.

In addition to infusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside cash into Feingold’s Wisconsin race, Coleman’s group has also spent $750,000 targeting Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) in her tight contest against Republican Dino Rossi and $450,000 attacking Senate candidate Rep. Paul Hodes (D) in New Hampshire. And because it is incorporated as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” nonprofit, the D.C.-based AAN does not publicly disclose its donors and has not listed any contributors on the independent expenditure forms it is obliged to file with the FEC.

This story is something of a mobius strip. The references to the memorial to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), who died in a plane crash shortly before the November 2002 election, seem to come out of nowhere.

Kennedy’s funeral hasn’t happened yet. Democratic appeals to honor his memory by passing a health care bill have existed, but there haven’t been too many of them; one from MoveOn.org, one from the DCCC, one from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Reporters ask Democrats what effect, if any, Kennedy’s death will have on the health care debate, and unless they’re lying they say it’ll galvanize Democrats. It simply seems gauche for this to be so easily transformed into a scandal of Democrats “exploiting” Kennedy’s death, which the party knew was imminent. And it’s being transformed so easily. Drudge is linking Tim Reid of the UK Times for a story headlined “Democrats accused of using Edward Kennedy’s death to promote reforms.” The accusers? Rush Limbaugh and the president of the Heritage Foundation.

The comparison between the Wellstone funeral and, well, anything else, is strange. The 2002 memorial was an unexpected reaction to an unexpected event, and it turned Minnesota politics upside down. Gov. Jesse Ventura (I-Minn.), who had promised to leave Wellstone’s seat open, reversed course and angrily appointed a friend, Dean Barkley, to serve until January 2003. Norm Coleman, who had suspended his campaign to honor Wellstone, re-launched it.

The odds of Kennedy’s funeral turning out similarly seem vanishingly small. And if politics are completely absent from the funeral, it would be highly unusual. President George W. Bush, remember, paid tribute to Ronald Reagan at his funeral by tying Reagan’s foreign policy to his own.

He was optimistic that a strong America could advance the peace, and he acted to build the strength that mission required. He was optimistic that liberty would thrive wherever it was planted, and he acted to defend liberty wherever it was threatened.

And Ronald Reagan believed in the power of truth in the conduct of world affairs. When he saw evil camped across the horizon, he called that evil by its name.

Should Bush have clipped those lines out of his speech for fear of seeming political? No, and it’s ridiculous to suggest as much. In the same way it’s ridiculous to pretend that a few conservative shouters have a veto over how Kennedy’s family should conduct his funeral or how Democrats should honor Kennedy. If anything, as Smith’s piece points out, the pre-emptive cry of “no more Wellstone funerals” tips their hand and defeats their purpose.

Former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) repeatedly used the video in ads to make Franken look like a madman. A month before the election, the Franken campaign put out an ad shaming Coleman for the distortion.

Today, the National Republican Senatorial Committee put out a web video informing voters that, with Franken’s arrival in the Senate, the Democrats have total control of Washington. The video they use of Franken? Multiple clips of him telling the Wellstone story, selectively edited to make him look like Lenin.

If you look closely, you can tell that Franken is yelling “You can take this guy!”

Using the worst possible video of a politician is hardly new; the slow-motion greyscale video of a candidate yawning is a staple of the negative ad. But this is a video of Franken telling a story about his dead friend, and it was aired countless times to make a case — Franken’s too crazy to be a senator! — that bombed with Minnesota voters.

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The conventional wisdom, fueled by an AP report today, is that he’d be a logical candidate and likely front-runner to succeed Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) in the governor’s mansion.

I wrote much of this back in June, but it hasn’t stopped being true: Coleman is not that popular. He’s run for statewide office three times, losing twice, and winning only after his opponent, the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), died in a plane crash and was replaced on the ballot by former Vice President Walter Mondale. Coleman’s clever and delicate 11th-hour campaign against Mondale was impressive, but it still only netted him 49.5 percent of the vote in a very good Republican year. The last Minnesota poll, conducted in April by the Star-Tribune, gave him a 17-point net negative favorable rating. And for much of 2007 and 2008, he was considered the heavy favorite for re-election, considering Al Franken’s long record of potentially controversial jokes, a strange tax issue (he failed to pay taxes on speaking fees in different states) and his difficulty uniting the Democratic base. (After Franken locked up the Democratic nomination at a state convention, he drew a bitter primary challenger who attacked him for his “record of pornography and degradation of women and minorities” and drew 30 percent of the primary vote.)

Add this to Coleman’s ongoing legal problems and considerable debt and it’s really quite strange that reporters handicap his chances for a comeback in an election only 16 months away.

While we’re discussing Coleman, it’s striking that he has run for office three times and never won a normal election. In 1998, he lost a race for governor to Jesse Ventura, the independent candidate. In 2002 he was losing a race for Senate against Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), but Wellstone died right before the election and Coleman beat his replacement, former Vice President Walter Mondale, as absentee ballots cast for Wellstone were tossed out. In 2008, of course, he lost to Al Franken. Discussions about Coleman’s political future seem strange at this juncture — voters really don’t like him very much.