Politico

The depressing job numbers released Thursday provided Democrats with a painful reminder that the economy is floundering on their watch now.

The 9.5 percent unemployment rate and the loss of 467,000 jobs gave Republicans plenty of fodder to blame President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress for failing to resurrect the economy in the six months since the stimulus passed.

“Where are the jobs?” asked a stream of Republican releases.

Democrats insist they’re not worried, and they are hopeful that the Republicans are peaking early in their criticism on the economy – 16 months before the mid term elections.

“People are going to make these judgments a year from now – more than a year from now,” said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum.

But the trend Thursday’s numbers represent should concern Democrats. While many analysts believe the economy will start growing again as early as the end of this year, average Americans will still feel they’re suffering through a deep recession well after growth rebounds – in part because unemployment lags behind recovery.

In the 1982 congressional elections, when unemployment was lingering in double digits, voters punished Republicans – despite President Ronald Reagan’s popularity – and the GOP lost 26 seats in the House.

And even if a recovery begins this year, it won’t arrive with booming stock markets, zooming home prices and spectacular job creation.

“The recovery when it happens is not going to be much to write home about,” said Bill Hampel, chief economist for the Credit Union National Association. “It’s going to be a long slow recovery and the economy is going to be pretty fragile.” 

It all adds up to a big challenge for Democrats, especially when faced with the historic reality that the party in power traditionally loses seats in the mid-term elections.

Republicans are already making the economy a major theme in targeted races. The National Republican Congressional Committee wasted no time Thursday in blasting out press releases slamming more than three dozen vulnerable Democrats for supporting party leaders’ “job-killing agenda.”

The Democratic response so far? Keep blaming President Bush.

In interviews, Democratic aides and analysts argued that polls show voters still place blame for the dismal economy squarely on the former president and they insist Democrats are doing what they need to do to show they’re fixing what Republicans broke.

“Not sure which is worse, listening to lectures about fiscal responsibility from Republicans or taking hunting lessons from Dick Cheney,” quipped Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “The crises we’ve inherited were not created in a day and will not be fixed overnight.”

“Every piece of polling shows an electorate filled with anxiety about the economy, but stone cold sober about the reality that we can’t climb out of this ditch overnight,” added David Wade, chief of staff for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

“They’re not going to judge this administration or this Congress after a few months, but they’re looking for indicators about which party gets what they’re going through. … And thus far [Democrats] haven’t handed the Republicans any meaningful chance to show that we’re out of touch.”

And Democrats believe the public is willing to give the new administration time.

“The public is showing remarkable patience with President Obama,” longtime Democratic consultant Jim Jordan told POLITICO. “They realize this is not a recession of his making or of the making of the Democratic Party. … What Democrats have going for us more than anything else is that the public hates Republicans even more.”

Eric Schultz, communications director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, mocked the Republican attacks. “This strategy, while illustrative of just how out of touch Republicans are with the economic realities people face, should not surprise anyone. It’s how we got into this mess in the first place and it’s why the Republican Party is in such trouble today,” he said.

But as the political operatives push back, the White House is actively preparing the public for the reality that unemployment is likely to pass the psychologically-significant 10 percent threshold.

“As I’ve said from the moment that I walked into the door of this White House, it took years for us to get into this mess, and it will take us more than a few months to turn it around,” Obama said Thursday, addressing the unemployment figures.

Democrats say they’re plan to frame their entire agenda in economic terms, making health care reform about easing the strain on middle class pocket books while making American businesses more competitive and pitching climate change legislation as a creator pf “green jobs.”

And for every GOP attack against the current administration’s policies, Democrats are shooting back that Republicans are content to twiddle their thumbs and hope for disaster.

“Times are tough, Americans deserve more than Republicans’ no jobs and no solutions, and no progress commitment to the status quo,” said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Republicans ought to roll their sleeves up and work with President Obama and House Democrats on turning the economy around.”

But Republican pollster David Winston said his surveys and others show that the public is beginning to doubt Obama’s ability to save the economy – a trend that emerged last month after unemployment rate hit 9.4 percent.

“That was a shock to the American public,” he said. The impact can be seen in lower poll numbers on Obama’s handling of the economy and job approval, among others, Winston said.

A June 18 Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found Obama’s job approval slipping below 60 percent to 56 percent, for instance. His handling of the economy fell to 51 percent from 55 percent in April, and nearly 70 percent of respondents expressed concern over federal interventions in the economy.

Shrum, the Democratic strategist, said the real test in all this for Democrats will be resisting their historic tendency to fracture under the stress of passing events and Republican pressure.

“The test for Democrats is whether they can hold their nerve and deal with health care, deal with financial reform,” he said. “Just move straight ahead.”

But many vulnerable Democrats have taken already political cover.

John Foster, senior adviser to Democratic Rep. Walt Minnick – whose Idaho district is considered one of the best GOP pickup opportunities in November – said that his boss is not concerned by the onslaught of negative publicity pushed by Republicans in reaction to the unemployment numbers.

"Statistics don’t win elections," Foster said. "Stories win elections. And [Minnick] is out, telling stories to constituents and hearing their stories."

Of course, Minnick has an out if the economy remains bad: He voted against the stimulus package and the climate change bill.

Melanie Mason contributed to this story.

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Norm Coleman has given his concession speech. Al Franken is off to Washington. And summer break has finally come for Larry Jacobs, chair of the political science department at the University of Minnesota, who achieved near omnipresence the last several months.

Since the rest of the country knew only so much about the great state of Minnesota, to say nothing of its state canvassing boards and its optical-scan voting machines, the job of putting it all into perspective has most often fallen to a troika of local university professors including Jacobs, Hamline University’s David Schultz and Carleton College’s Steven Schier.

Rarely does a university employee get this much airtime unless he has a whistle around his neck and a Nike Swoosh on his jacket.

Tuesday, the day the race finally ended, was the culmination of the professors’ many months worth of public predictions and explanations. And it concluded with quite a bang for each.

“It was like instantaneous combustion,” says Jacobs. “What we talked about for months happened in hours.”

“The most important things in all these calls was getting the college’s name spelled right,” says Schier. “It really doesn’t matter if my name is spelled right. Because we are here in flyover country, to the extent you get national media interested in college, you want to make sure the presentation is correct.”

The first phone call came to Jacobs from a reporter around 1 p.m. central time, a heads up that the State Supreme Court ruling on Coleman’s legal challenge to the election results was about to come down. Jacobs, who had been in his basement working on a book project, quickly got online to brief himself before the inevitable flood of calls came in. And did they ever.

By nightfall, he had spent six continuous hours doing 15 interviews, and then did a few more – including one with POLITICO – Wednesday morning, before heading out to Ocean City, NJ, for some much needed beach time.

Schultz, meanwhile, stood outside Coleman’s St. Paul house Tuesday, where the former senator delivered his concession remarks. There, the professor bounced from reporter to reporter, from television satellite truck to satellite truck, summing it all up.

In June, he had predicted that the state Supreme Court would hand down a 5-0 decision in favor of Franken, and that it would come just before the July 4 weekend. Schultz has, in fact, been in fine form with his prognostications for much of the recount, making up for what he says was a string of bad calls he committed during the 2000 Florida recount. 

“I have to sort of say I got dumb lucky on this on one level,” Schultz told POLITICO.
Jacobs has been the go-to voice on the Minnesota political scene for the last seven election cycles, but nothing has compared to this. By this springtime, he was a local celebrity, what with all the appearances on local and national TV. Indeed, so synonymous has his name and face been with the Franken-Coleman saga, he was at one point confronted in a supermarket checkout line by a woman furious over how long the recount was taking – as if Jacobs was personally responsible for it.

Reporters have been asking him about Franken since the summer of 2007, when the former Saturday Night Live performer was emerging as the comedian candidate.

By last summer, a confluence of various factors had put the Land of 10,000 Lakes right in the center of the political pool. Not only was there this intriguing Senate race, but Minnesota also was the site where Barack Obama spoke after clinching the Democratic nomination last June. A few months later, it hosted the Republican National Convention and in between, the state’s governor Tim Pawlenty, was regularly bandied about as a possibility to join Sen. John McCain on the Republican ticket.

“There were a number of days where I would be on three of the networks, as well as public radio on the same day,” Jacobs recalls. “It was just off the wall. And it wasn’t like people were going out there looking for stories.”

And then came Nov. 4, the irresolution of the election, and the start of an eight-month recount process that turned “three-judge panel” and “previously-rejected absentee ballot” into common cable news colloquialisms.

In the immediate aftermath of election day, Jacobs described the flabbergasting experience from the perspective of a man who knew he would be counted on to explain this to myriad befuddled reporters.

“It was like being at the bottom of a mountain when a volcano goes off,” he says. “You are trying to judge how ferocious it’s going to be and how far lava flow is going to go.”

Immediately, it was a sprint to the statue books, and for half a year, the arcane details of Minnesota election law have comprised the great all-consuming side project for each of the professors.

Says Schultz: “To simply say this displaced a lot of other stuff in life would be an understatement. Everything else you do kind of gets thrown out the window.”?

However, the professors found plenty of opportunities to engage this information, and the recount, in their classrooms.

“Let’s be honest, a third of any class is there for reasons other than absorbing all wisdom I could impart,” says Jacobs. “They are just looking to meet a requirement and get their card punched, but this was something like, ‘Holy smokes, this professor, I just saw him on TV last night.’ And I was just brutal in exploiting that.”

So now what?

“I am going to the gym to work out,” Schultz said on Wednesday. “That’s what I need to do more of. I need to get in shape.”

Schultz says he plans to work on a law review article with a student of his about the recount. Jacobs is pondering writing a book. Schier says he’s just looking to take a “breather.”

“There are certain words I plan not to Google as long as possible,” he says. “‘Franken,’ ‘Coleman,’ ‘Minnesota Supreme Court,’ and ‘Minnesota recount.’ My Google routines are definitely going to change dramatically.”

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Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) tried to announce some positive news about the cost of health reform Thursday, but hardly anyone could hear him and other senators over the coughing, yawning and sustained chorus of Muzak.

Dodd convened a conference call with reporters to tout a new Congressional Budget Office estimate that the latest version of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee bill would cost $611 billion over 10 years.

But the call devolved into a series of mishaps, apparently due to due to problems with the Senate conference call system.

Dodd and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) could be heard congratulating their staff and describing multiple calls with CBO chief Doug Elemendorf. A dog barked in the background. One person yawned loudly, and quickly apologized for it. 

They were rolling through the details when, at about 30 minutes into the call, elevator music began drowning out Brown and Whitehouse and the reporters trying to ask questions. (Dodd had already left the call to catch a flight).

“Health care musical chairs,” one person said.

The Associated Press’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar could be heard explaining details of the call with a colleague before another reporter on the line hushed him up: “Ricardo, we can hear you.”

Eventually, the senators gave up and abandoned the call, while many reporters stayed on until the music stopped about 15 minutes after it started.

At that point, only Senate staff was left to field questions, although Whitehouse later rejoined.

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Three leading South Carolina Republican office-holders, including the state’s two U.S. senators, called Gov. Mark Sanford Wednesday for what GOP sources close to the lawmakers described as frank conversations about the governor’s ability to carry out his job.

Republican Sens. Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham and Republican Rep. Gresham Barrett talked with Sanford a day after the governor gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he revealed new details about his affair, including declaring his Argentine mistress to be his “soul mate.”

Three top South Carolina GOP sources confirmed the calls but were hesitant to say whether the lawmakers had urged Sanford to resign.

“The conversations are clearly geared toward do the right thing,” said one top South Carolina Republican.

Another top Republican in the state said of the governor: “His support has collapsed.”

“He was made aware that his support is getting to be dang-near nonexistent,” said this Republican, calling the AP interview “the final straw.”

During an interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” DeMint said that a lot of state Republicans are talking to Sanford "behind the scenes in hopes that he’ll make the right decision about what needs to be done.”

Asked to clarify what the “right decision” would be, DeMint responded: “I don’t want to say.”

DeMint said Sanford’s further confessions to the AP were "not a wise thing to do in this business.”

“They say, when you are explaining, you are losing. And particularly on that subject, I think, he was,” the senator said. “I’m concerned of whether or not he is in a position that he can continue to lead the state.”

“I think we will see some resolution in the next week.”

But even as these Republicans, among the most prominent in the state party, edge toward calling for Sanford to resign, the governor seems to have dug in his heels.

Asked about the calls, Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer would only say: “The governor has given a full and truthful account, and he is finished discussing this matter. He is focused on being governor, on rebuilding his marriage, and on building back the trust of South Carolinians.”

Of the three, Graham is probably closest to Sanford, serving as god father to the governor’s youngest son. Barrett, who represents an Upstate district, is running for governor next year.

None of the three have publicly called for Sanford to quit. By placing private phone calls to the governor, it would seem their hope is for him to step down without further public pressure.

Already, over half of the GOP caucus in the state Senate has called on the governor to step down.

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In advance of Congress’ return next week, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that he’s hard at work drafting a public plan option that competes on a level playing field with private insurance companies.

Schumer, a key member of the Senate Finance Committee, has been pushing the proposal since May and the announcement comes on the heels of news that the Senate health committee will propose a public option in legislation it is considering.

“There is renewed momentum for a public plan that competes on a level playing field with private insurers. Any plan absolutely must be available to all Americans from the first day in order to successfully keep private insurers honest,” Schumer said.

The New York senator fashioned his public option as a compromise that has competed for the middle ground with a co-op proposal by Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad, and Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe’s plan to trigger a public plan option if private insurers don’t deliver affordable coverage.

Insiders say there’s a real possibility that the more conservative Finance Committee will end up proposing a co-op plan. But with the House staking out a public plan option further to the left than Schumer’s and the co-op leaning further right, Schumer is working to ensure his option becomes the middle ground.

Snowe made news this week by supporting a public plan with a trigger, even earning a call from President Barack Obama, which she touted in a news release.

But Schumer argues neither the trigger nor the co-op would be immediately available to Americans. His plan would be ready on day one and adhere to the same rules as private plans and be self-sustaining.

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The campaign finance dream team of Sens. Russ Feingold and John McCain is reuniting to block President Barack Obama’s first appointment to the Federal Election Commission, and to push him to shake up the embattled agency.

In a surprising move that invokes memories of a bitter skirmish during Obama’s annihilation of McCain in last year’s presidential election, Feingold (D-Wis.) and McCain (R-Ariz.) have placed a hold on the FEC nomination of Democratic labor lawyer John Sullivan, POLITICO confirmed Tuesday. It’s a reunion which could reverberate in Congress, the White House, the 2010 midterm elections and beyond.

In a statement issued in response to POLITICO’s inquiries, the lawmakers signaled they would release the hold only if Obama taps two additional nominees to fill expired seats on the six-member independent panel, which critics contend is systematically deregulating campaign rules.

“The FEC is currently mired in anti-enforcement gridlock,” read the joint statement from Feingold and McCain, whose names became synonymous with efforts to limit the role of special interest cash in politics when they teamed to shepherd into law the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, better known as McCain-Feingold. “The President must nominate new commissioners with a demonstrated commitment to the existence and enforcement of the campaign finance laws.”

Their hold on Sullivan, who would replace a commissioner whose term expired two years ago, was exhilarating to advocates of limiting the role of money in politics, who want Obama to chart a new course for the agency. And it was an unmistakable shot across the bow of both Senate leaders and Obama, who have not moved to replace the two commissioners whose terms expired in May.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who the White House had consulted on the Sullivan nomination, declined to comment on the hold through a spokesman, while an aide to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did not respond to questions.

The White House, which has reached out to the self-styled campaign finance reform community in an unprecedented way, also did not respond to questions about the hold.

But Craig Holman, a campaign finance lobbyist for the non-profit group Public Citizen, called news of the hold “delightfully surprising.”

“First of all, it’s good to see McCain and Feingold working together again on the campaign finance front,” said Holman.

He and other campaign finance reformers had worked closely for years with McCain on campaign finance matters until the Senator began distancing himself from them in the run-up to his presidential campaign as he courted the GOP base. It considers restrictions on political spending to be a violation of free speech.

In regards to reconfiguring the FEC, Holman, who has met with Obama’s representatives several times about campaign finance issues since the election, said “the White House needs pushing on this. [Obama] hasn’t come out in front in the battle.”

As a Senator, Obama was a staunch advocate for beefing up campaign finance rules, and as a presidential candidate he touted a campaign finance measure as one of his top legislative accomplishments. He also promised that he would participate in a Watergate-era clean election system if his Republican opponent did the same.

When McCain won the Republican nomination and agreed to participate, though, Obama flip-flopped, earning the personal enmity of McCain and the scorn of editorial boards and campaign finance reformers.

At the time, Obama pledged to fix the system as president. But he has yet to respond to entreaties from Feingold to support an overhaul bill. And he disappointed reformers when he passed up the chance to dramatically reconfigure the FEC, which has increasingly deadlocked in partisan 3-3 votes on enforcement matters, resulting in dismissal after dismissal and, reformers fear, emboldening would-be violators on the cusp of the 2010 midterm elections.

The commission by statute consists of three appointees from each party, and traditionally Senate leaders have passed lists of acceptable commissioner candidates from their respective parties to the president, who then selects nominees for Senate approval.

The terms of one Democratic and one Republican commissioner – Steven Walther and Don McGahn, respectively – expired in May, while another Democratic commissioner, Ellen Weintraub, has continued to serve on commission even though her term expired two years ago.

But Obama in May announced a single nomination – Sullivan’s – to fill Weintraub’s seat. The White House touted Sullivan, an associate general counsel at the Service Employees International Union, as “a staunch advocate for election reform” and promised that more FEC nominations “will be forthcoming,” but would not say when.

The Campaign Legal Center, a reform group headed by McCain ally and former FEC chairman Trevor Potter, criticized Sullivan for “bash[ing] important elements of McCain-Feingold” when he filed comments with the FEC on behalf of SEIU.

But Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Center, said the real problem Obama needs to address is McGahn, the commission chairman, and the two other Republican commissioners, who have regularly voted against enforcement, often against the recommendation of the FEC’s career legal staff.

“Doing something about the FEC without doing something about the McGahn problem is just unacceptable,” McGehee said, adding “this is a guy who is basically implementing a deregulatory ideology in violation of both the spirit and letter of the law.”

That’s not how former FEC chairman Brad Smith sees it.

Smith – who leads the Center for Competitive Politics, which holds that some limits on campaign spending unconstitutionally suppress free speech – defended the 3-3 splits as the byproduct of a thorough analysis of the law’s application to specific cases and accused Feingold and McCain of targeting McGahn.

“Let’s not dress this up as some noble crusade for good government – McCain and Feingold want someone on the commission who agrees with them,” Smith said. “And they’re going to hold up a guy [Sullivan] who seems to be really a very qualified nominee out of petulance.”

Smith also questioned McCain’s re-embrace of campaign finance issues.

“A cynic might note that now that McCain is no longer seeking the Republican nomination he has returned to the fold.”

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Al Franken finally celebrates his Minnesota senate victory.

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The Republican Party put an inordinate amount of faith in Norm Coleman’s long-shot legal challenge, spending a million bucks on the idea that he’d catch a break in court.

But like dominoes, each Coleman legal challenge failed, one after another, ruling after ruling, until the final, decisive blow Tuesday when the Minnesota Supreme Court picked apart Coleman’s arguments and awarded Democrat Al Franken the Senate seat.

Even though national Republicans talked a big game about taking this case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Coleman had two key reasons to give up: he was running out of money and the state high court decisively rejected his constitutional arguments – undermining any case he might have made in federal court.

And there may have been another driving factor in Coleman’s concession: His political future. Coleman has been talked up as a potential candidate for governor, and once the state Supreme Court spoke, it would have been difficult to maintain credibility in his home state while holding up the Senate decision.

In an emotional concession speech Tuesday outside his home in St. Paul, Coleman wouldn’t talk about his political future, but said he reached his decision to concede because “we’d just been through a long process.”

“I wanted a chance to raise the issues that we thought had to be raised, to enfranchise a lot of folks whose votes hadn’t been counted. We had a chance to do that,” Coleman said. “And we went to the highest court in this state. And so, I think the issues have been heard. You know, even the equal protection argument, this was the first court that fully considered it. They considered it, and they rejected our argument.”

Indeed, as much as Coleman’s camp said that voters were being disenfranchised, his legal arguments failed to resonate the way similar arguments did in Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Unlike the 2000 Florida presidential recount, when judges broke along ideological lines, the Minnesota judges hailed from all political stripes and issued clear unanimous decisions – failing to give Coleman an opening by issuing a dissenting opinion.

Minnesota election law was remarkably clear in spelling out the procedures for a recount in reviewing ballots to be considered and accepted, ensuring that the now infamous questions over punch-card ballots and hanging chads in 2000 wouldn’t be repeated.

“The opinion was decisive,” said Sarah Janecek, a GOP political analyst in Minnesota, pointing to the court’s rejection of Coleman’s equal-protection arguments. “So he really had nothing to sue any further on.”

If Coleman had kept going after losing a unanimous ruling, it would appear that the Republican Party was delaying the inevitable seating of Franken for purely political purposes, risking further damage to his political career and a party still trying to recover from last year’s elections.

“Coleman made a political calculation not to take it out of his home state,” said Craig Shirley, a GOP strategist.

The court rejected Coleman’s constitutional claims that his due process was violated and that the results ran afoul from the Constitution’s equal protection argument because election officials used different standards for gauging absentee ballots.

“No one should blame the lawyers here on the Coleman side,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “They just had a hard luck draw. I don’t know if Franken’s lawyers would have done any better if the numbers were reversed. … They [the Coleman legal team] had the facts and the law against them.” 

Coleman’s pocketbook also played a factor – given the millions he’s already raised since Election Day and the millions more he and the Republican Party would have to spend to continue to keep further appeals alive.

“Norm Coleman is busted financially,” said Larry Jacobs, an expert on state politics at the University of Minnesota. “He’s in debt for this campaign, he owes at least $100,000 for Al Franken’s attorney fees, he’s also got personal debt. This is a guy who [was] going to be much more cautious about winging this thing [for a Supreme Court review].”

Franken’s upcoming seating will give Democrats their biggest majority in the Senate in a generation, ensuring their party holds a 60-40 majority – enough to quash GOP filibusters if they stay united.

And with that, some Republicans see an ironic silver lining – Democrats have nobody else to blame if their agenda falls short even though that will be tough with an ideologically diverse caucus and the absences of Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who have been sidelined by illnesses. GOP strategists say it will solidify their argument heading into the 2010 elections that electing more Republicans would be a critical check on one-party dominance in Washington.

“The implications of this Senate race are particularly significant because the Democrats will now have 60 votes in the Senate,” said Sen. John Cornyn, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “With their supermajority, the era of excuses and finger-pointing is now over.”

Republican leaders were supportive of Coleman’s decision to concede, but some suggested that they would have been right behind him had he taken the case either to the U.S. Supreme Court or file a new suit in a federal district court.

“While I would have proudly stood behind Norm Coleman had he chosen to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, I know that his decision to withdraw from this race was not an easy one, but one that he felt was the best decision for the people of Minnesota,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

Alex Castellanos, a GOP media consultant, said in an interview that Franken’s win might “stimulate fundraising,” for Republicans. But, he added: “When you get beat by a comedian, you know your party’s at the nadir.”

In their news conferences Tuesday, both Franken and Coleman downplayed the impact of Franken becoming a filibuster-crushing 60th Democrat.

“As far as [being the 60th member of the Democratic Caucus] is concerned, 60 is a magic number and it isn’t because we know we have Republicans who are going to vote with the majority of Democrats on certain votes, and Republicans who are going to vote with the majority of Democrats on certain votes,” Franken said. ‘So it’s not quite a magic number as some people may say. But I hope we do get President Obama’s agenda through.”

Franken, who will hold a victory rally Wednesday and will be seated in the Senate next week, will assume coveted committee assignments on the Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee and the Judiciary Committee, allowing him to play a role in influencing the debates over health-care reform and the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor when Congress returns from its Fourth of July break.

But Coleman suggested at his news conference that his decision to concede was less about the impact on the Senate and more on his dimming chances.

And people who know him well seemed to share that view.

“I think he’d been prepared for this moment for a long time,” Janecek, who spoke to Coleman earlier this month. “There comes a point where it is what it is.”

John Bresnahan and Martin Kady II contributed to this story.

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The Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously ruled Al Franken the winner of last November’s Senate race, putting the former “Saturday Night Live” star on the brink of becoming a United States senator and Democrats on the cusp of holding a dominant supermajority in the Senate.

In a unanimous 5-0 decision, the court upheld a three-judge panel’s April 14 ruling that Franken defeated Republican Norm Coleman in the race by 312 votes out of 2.9 million cast.

The question now is whether the incumbent Republican senator will petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case – and if Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty would sign an election certificate in the interim – potentially prolonging a final decision for months. Doing so also would force Coleman to raise significant more funds to keep his court challenge going. While the court did not compel Pawlenty to certify Franken as the winner, the court said that Franken is “entitled” under Minnesota law to “receive the certificate election as United States Senator from the State of Minnesota.”

In its ruling, the state supreme court wrote affirmed the lower court’s ruling: “The trial court did not err when it included in the final election tally the election day returns of a precinct in which some ballots were lost before the manual recount.”

If Franken is seated, Democrats would hold a 60-40 majority in the Senate, the largest the party has enjoyed in a generation. Sixty votes are needed to break filibusters, ensuring that if Democrats stay united they would be able to cleave the GOP’s last lever of power in Washington. A Franken “yes” vote on health reform, climate change legislation and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor gives Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) even more of a margin for error on these major votes.

Democrats were already celebrating the result.

“We’ve always said that Norm Coleman deserved his day in court, and he got eight months,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Now we expect Governor Pawlenty to do the right thing, follow the law, and sign the election certificate.”

And at the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs told POLITICO, they were “pleased” with the result.

Coleman’s team argued that scores of ballots were wrongfully rejected and violated the Constitution’s equal protection argument since election officials used different standards for counting thousands of absentee ballots. It called for the case to be remanded to lower court so that more ballots could be opened. But Franken’s team successfully convinced the court otherwise and argued that it’s not unusual for ballots to be rejected for any number of reasons.

Coleman, 59, now will face a question on what to do next. With Pawlenty’s decision to forgo a third term, Coleman could mount a bid for governor. In 2002, Coleman was first elected to the Senate after Democratic incumbent Paul Wellstone died 11 days before the election; he later defeated former Vice President Walter Mondale who entered the race days before the election. Originally a Democrat when he first became mayor of St. Paul, Coleman changed his affiliation to the Republican Party in 1996.

Following a mandatory recount, Franken was certified the winner on Jan. 5 by 225 votes following a mandatory hand recount in the state, but Coleman vowed to contest the results in state court. It’s unknown what his intentions are beyond this point, but he would likely get strong support from national Republicans to continue pursuing the case through the federal courts.

Amie Parnes contributed to this report

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Half of South Carolina voters think Republican Gov. Mark Sanford should remain in office following his admission last week to an extramarital affair, according to a new InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research poll.

Among the 949 registered voters surveyed Monday night, 49.8 percent said Sanford should remain governor, compared with 41.4 percent who said he should resign. The remaining 8.8 percent had no opinion.

Voters were split along party lines, with 62.7 percent of Republicans saying Sanford should stay and 60.2 percent of Democrats saying he should give up his office.

Additionally, 54.2 percent of white voters said Sanford should stay, compared to 37.2 percent who said he should resign. A majority of black voters, 62.3 to 25.6 percent, favored the governor’s resignation.

Men and women favored Sanford remaining in office by similar numbers, with 52 percent of men and 48.8 percent of women saying the governor should keep his job.

The poll was conducted prior to Sanford’s admission to The Associated Press on Tuesday that he met with his Argentine mistress more times than had previously been disclosed. Sanford told the news agency that he has met the woman seven times since 2001, with five of the encounters occurring in the past year.

The governor insisted that no public funds were used to pay for those rendezvous, and he has pledged to pay back the public money used to pay for his stop in Argentina during a June 2008 trade mission to Brazil.

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