New York Times plays dumb about sore loser Norm Coleman

In the Sunday magazine, the Times' Matt Bai perfectly captured the Beltway press' soft take on Coleman's unprecedented effort to drag out the recount effort in Minnesota; an effort that even some Republicans have admitted is hopeless and was done purely in an effort to delay the seating of Democrat Al Franken.

But according to media elites, Coleman isn't a sore loser (Al Gore was a sore loser!), and his four-corners defense didn't show contempt for the voters of Minnesota. Instead, it represented savvy hardball. 

The Times' headline:

Everyone a Winner? The Lost Art of Conceding Defeat

And right away, Bai seemed to excuse Coleman's behavior:  

Even before he ran for re-election to the Senate, Norm Coleman saw more than his share of ignominious elections. First he lost the Minnesota governorship to a former pro wrestler who called himself the Body. Then he just barely managed to wrest a Senate seat from an opponent, Paul Wellstone, who had recently perished in a plane crash. So can you really blame Coleman for having spent the last eight months furiously trying not to have to concede defeat to Al Franken -- a man who once acted alongside a gorilla on the set of “Trading Places”?

You can't really blame Coleman, wrote Bai. After all, he lost to guy who used to be a comedian. But does anybody think that if Coleman had lost to a Democratic candidate who was an attorney or an investment banker than Coleman wouldn't have also pursued the same, losing delay strategy?

Of course, not. But the press loves to point out how Franken's just a comedian. Why? Because the Beltway press doesn't take Franken seriously, which is one reason pundits and reporters have played dumb about Coleman's extraordinary and unprecedented sore loser routine in 2009.

But the Times article got worse as Bai tried to couch Coleman's unmatched delay efforts as part of a larger social and political trend, where people just can't admit defeat anymore:

What is new are the lengths to which losing candidates will now routinely go — and the money the parties will spend — to avoid their certain fates.

Problem is, Bai can't find a single other politician who has ever played the sore loser role as enthusiastically as Coleman. Bai did point to the Washington state governors race in 2004 and noted it "disputed for eight months." Technically, that's accurate. But Washington seated its governor in January, 2005, just two months after Election Day, whereas  Minnesota is still waiting to seat its second senator, thanks to Coleman's stall tactics.

The other example Bai pointed to was " a special election for Congress in New York dragged on for more than three weeks amid legal arguments over what did and did not constitute a valid ballot." How exactly does a routine, three-week recount compare to Coleman's seven month-and-counting odyssey? Answer: It does not.

Meaning, Coleman's not part of any larger cultural trend where politicians can no longer concede defeat. Hundreds (thousands?) of them do it every election cycle in cities and states across the country. Coleman represents the radical exception, but the 'liberal media' are too timid to call him out on it.