Homocon

Coleman went on to take 50% of the vote in the hotly contested election, and then wasted no time in securing himself a position of prime political influence within the Republican dominated Senate. He nabbed a seat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, is now cochairman of the bipartisan Senate Biofuels Caucus, serves as a member of the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee and also as the Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (a panel of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee), where he is now heading the investigation of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Corruption Scandal involving the misappropriation of billions of dollars, plus payoffs and kickbacks to numerous foreign, as well as domestic, corporations.

"He's a very talented politician," says Ron Ebensteiner, chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party. "What he was particularly good at was working across party lines, getting people of all parties, races, ethnicities going in the same direction."

But it's the tireless, and quite often thankless, pursuit of corruption in the former United Nations Oil-for-Food program that has launched Coleman into the national spotlight, where he has appeared on all the major news and political-analysis shows calling for the resignation of Kofi Annan: "It's time for Kofi Annan to step down," he stated in December of 2004. "The massive scope of this debacle demands nothing less. If this widespread corruption had occurred in any legitimate organization around the world, its CEO would have been ousted long ago, in disgrace. Why is the U.N. different?"

Much has been made of Senator Coleman's defection from the Democratic Party back when he was Mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, with Democrats spending the last several years criticizing him for voting "too much in lockstep" with the Republicans. Yet this is not an entirely true accusation. While Coleman confessed that he had to be more of a "team player" in 2004 to help get President Bush re-elected, he's now focusing his efforts in 2005 on both sides of the political fence, voting for the President's proposed reforms of class action and bankruptcy law, but also working successfully to block Bush's proposed cuts in the Community Development Block Grant program, voting to block proposed cuts in the Medicaid program, voting with Democrats on a bill to increase the minimum wage and attempting to block drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (AANWR).

"Anybody who runs against him will have a hard time painting him as a Bush clone," said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, with David Strom, president of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, adding that no one should be surprised by Coleman's political independence -- "He's not an ideological figure," Strom said. "He's very much a pragmatist."

Coleman admitted in a recent interview that his stint as Mayor of St. Paul had a lot to do with his current attempts at peace-making and bridge-building within the U.S. Senate. "It's the mayor in me," he stated, and political analyst Shier agrees. "As a mayor, he had to cut deals and be practical in solving problems. Both of those explain why he's showing some independence . . ."

But politicians will always have their detractors, especially the successful politicians.

Garrison Keillor, who once claimed "I don't know any common people personally" and mercilessly lampooned Republicans who objected to Clinton's philandering, penned a hilariously bitter tirade against the newly elected Senator, in which he stated, in a sour and gossipy attempt to discredit both Coleman's character and marriage: "Norm got a free ride from the press. Anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows Norm’s habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting…"; a site called BushBoy lampoons Coleman as "manipulated by the President & Big Business instead of doing what he should--representing Minnesota's interests"; and Joseph Biden reportedly called Coleman a "kiss-ass" during a non-broadcast lull in the Don Imus radio show.

But none of the sniping from the sidelines affects Coleman's enthusiasm for his work as a representative of the people of Minnesota, and of the United States at large. As Mayor of St. Paul, he was credited with economically revitalizing St. Paul's downtown, bringing a National Hockey League franchise back to Minnesota, and improving the city's credit rating, though he was eventually booted out of the Minnesota Democratic Party for clashing with teachers over vouchers and with municipal unions over privatization. And his dogged determination to uncover the truth behind where the Oil-for-Food money actually went, holding UN President Kofi Annan responsible for what appears to be corruption and cronyism within the UN on a massive scale (including payoffs and kickbacks to Annan's own son, along with the possibility that the billions of dollars intended for the Iraqi people found its way into terrorist hands instead), can only be attributed to the committed and passionate character he formulated while still a long-haired student activist at Hofstra University on Long Island, deeply involved in the Vietnam War protests and the ongoing civil rights movement.

But just how did a young Jewish boy from a liberal family in Brooklyn, who participated in student protests in college and served as Bill Clinton's 1996 state campaign cochair, wind up as a staunchly antiabortion (his first two children died as infants from a genetic defect known as Zellweger syndrome) Republican Senator from Minnesota and a big-league player on the world politics stage?

"I know what the worst thing in the world is," Coleman has said, referring to the deeply personal loss of his two children. "Everything else is manageable."