Politics

WASHINGTON (AP) ― In 2004, Sen. Norm Coleman went to bat for President Bush's re-election campaign, attacking Democratic candidate John Kerry as weak on defense and a flip-flopper. At the time, Coleman acknowledged he risked a backlash from voters in Minnesota, but said he could be most effective for the state by having a good relationship with the president.

Now, as Coleman seeks re-election to a second term, his connection to the unpopular president -- and by extension the unpopular GOP -- is proving to be a liability. His DFL opponent, Al Franken, paints Coleman as a Bush loyalist, using both Coleman's public pronouncements and his voting record.

Coleman responds that he's sided with Bush and his party when it's best for the state, but has also voted against them when he thought it best for his constituents back home.

"I don't think there's anything wrong about being partisan, as long as it doesn't prevent you from reaching across and being nonpartisan where it's important to the people you represent," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "I never believed service here is about me standing in a corner by myself to prove how, quote, independent I am.

"I believe in core principles that you don't grow jobs by more taxes and more regulation. You secure peace through military strength. I believe judges should interpret the Constitution."

But, Coleman stressed, he's teamed up with Senate liberals -- and against the majority of his party -- on things like higher education grants and heating assistance for low income people.

Franken's campaign argues that on the big stuff, Coleman has made his priorities clear.

"On the issues that matter to Minnesotans -- the economy, the war in Iraq and Social Security -- Norm Coleman has stood with George Bush every step of the way," said Franken campaign spokeswoman Colleen Murray. "When it comes to choosing between Minnesotans or George Bush, Norm Coleman chooses George Bush every time."

A review of Coleman's voting record shows a complex picture. He has opposed his party on numerous occasions, siding with Democrats and a small group of GOP moderates on issues such as increasing heating assistance for the poor and against drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But he's also been a pretty dependable ally of Bush on some big-ticket items, such as tax cuts and Iraq, going back to his days as a candidate in 2002. That year, he hammered then-Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Democrat, for opposing the resolution authorizing military force against Iraq.

"This is one of those examples where you say, 'Hey, this guy is way outside the mainstream,"' Coleman said at the time. (Wellstone died in a plane crash, and Coleman went on to defeat the Democratic replacement, former Vice President Walter Mondale.)

Does Coleman still think that assessment is accurate, given how things turned out in Iraq?

"I'm not going to go back and characterize anything about Senator Wellstone. I went through that once, I'm not going to do that," said Coleman, who in his first year in the Senate called himself "a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone." He later apologized, saying he had meant that in the context of his relationship with the White House.

But Coleman did defend his "mainstream" comment, saying, "Based on the information everybody had, was the mainstream -- including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and everyone else -- supporting moving forward? Yes."

Coleman made another comment during that campaign that Democrats now gleefully bring up. He introduced Bush by saying, "When we sing 'God Bless America,' it is a prayer, and I believe this person is part of God's answer."

In the interview, Coleman said that he was referring to Bush's initial response to the Sept. 11 attacks, and he still believes that Bush was a better choice to lead the nation at that time over 2000 Democratic candidate Al Gore. But the senator also took the opportunity, unprompted, to criticize the president.

"Have there been mistakes, a series of them, and foul-ups along the way? Absolutely," he said, citing specifically the reconstruction effort in Iraq.

In his first year in the Senate, Coleman voted with President Bush 98 percent of the time, according to ratings by Congressional Quarterly, and voted with fellow Republicans 92 percent of the time. Those numbers have gone down since then, and by 2007, they were 68 percent and 64 percent, respectively. But Coleman insists he has not repositioned himself as his election approached, as Democrats claim.

He noted that in 2003, a lot of votes were on President Bush's judicial nominations.

"And I'm there on judges," Coleman said. "I think appointing judges who interpret the Constitution, don't legislate from the bench, and who are qualified, is critical."

Coleman also points out that even in his early years, his party unity ratings were among the lowest among Senate Republicans. Looked at another way, his opposition rating in his party was 8th in 2003, 13th in 2004, 6th in 2005, 8th in 2006 and 5th in 2007.

"The issue is not about a conscious effort to move away, it's simply when confronted with issue votes, my judgment is, 'Is this good for Minnesota?"' he said.

Besides the funding for heating programs for the needy and ANWR, Coleman has also taken other stances counter to his party, such as supporting fully funding the Community Development Block program, increasing Pell Grant funding, favoring the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and new hate crimes legislation.

Last year, he was one of nine Republicans to team up with Democrats to halt a GOP filibuster on a hate crimes bill that would let federal law enforcement help states prosecute attacks on gays. The bill was attached to a spending bill for the Iraq war, which passed the Senate; but the hate crimes provision was later dropped by the House. The hate crimes legislation has yet to pass Congress.

"I believe in human rights," Coleman said. Yet he has also stressed his opposition to gay marriage, and has voted for going forward with a vote on a constitutional amendment to ban it.

And even on Iraq, while opposing timetables for withdrawal, Coleman has occasionally strayed from the party and sided with Democrats: last year, for example, he was one of seven Republican senators to vote for an amendment requiring troops to spend as much time at home as in battle. The amendment fell four votes short of the 60 needed to prevent a filibuster.

In reflecting on his six years in the Senate, Coleman does allow for one regret. He said he should have been more aggressive in challenging the judicial system at Guantanamo Bay, the Pentagon's specially designed system for prosecuting terror suspects.

"I represented the human rights department when I first came to the Minnesota Attorney General's office," he said. "Based on who I am and what I've done, I should have been a little more vigorous in raising the questions about due process."

He cited concerns made by former prosecutors at Guantanamo, who have accused superiors of political meddling or deliberately misleading senior civilian Pentagon officials about the quality of evidence against defendants.

"The military commission process, it just seems to me from what I've been reading, was not as vigorous with the standards that Americans expect," he said, adding that if re-elected, he would raise the issue next year.

Coleman, a former Democrat who co-chaired Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign in Minnesota, took umbrage at a question about who was the better president: Bush or Clinton.

"I'm not going to answer," he said. "Goodness, gracious. Let's look forward. The Democrats want this campaign to be about George Bush. It's about the future. Listen -- did this president make a lot of mistakes? Absolutely." But he said Clinton did as well.

"And people today are worried about their future," Coleman said. "And I'm focused on their future."

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Norm Coleman was born in New York City in 1949. Al Franken was born in New York City in 1951.

(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)