Both sides try to score points with public

Call it recount rhetoric: the heated, hyperbolic sound bites that have been lobbed back and forth like grenades for a month now.

It began just hours after the polls closed on Election Day and, if anything, has grown even more incendiary.

Early on, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman's campaign accused DFL challenger Al Franken's of a "brazen, desperate effort" to "stuff the ballot box."

Franken's campaign decried the Coleman camp's "Saturday morning sneak attack."

As recently as this week, when 133 ballots went missing in Minneapolis, both sides amped up the shout-fest. Team Franken called it "a five-alarm fire," while Team Coleman blistered its rivals for a "bizarre and repulsive" plot to "raid" the church where the ballots were cast.

But if both campaigns have maintained a steady tone of outrage, each has performed a dizzying backflip on how they regard the recount process.

At the outset, Coleman's forces disparaged the recount itself as unneeded and questioned the integrity of elections systems as early vote corrections cut into the senator's lead. Franken's campaign defended the recount as essential and elections officials as above reproach.

"It's a classic example of where you stand depends on where you sit," said Kathryn Pearson, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. "They've had to change their message as the situation they've found themselves in has changed."

Core themes

Even as the campaigns have traded places on their confidence in the process, each has stuck to a simple argument. Franken's is: Count every vote, and include as many as possible. Coleman's is: Follow the rules, and count every vote that was legally cast.

Franken's count-every-vote theme has grown broader as the weeks have passed with Coleman still ahead, says David Schultz, a professor of public administration at Hamline University in St. Paul.

"It's gone from count every accepted ballot to count everything possible that can be counted," Schultz said.

The intended target of this verbal barrage is partly the general public, Pearson said, in the hopes that citizens will exert pressure on the opposing camp. She added that the rhetoric also is squarely aimed at each candidate's base, to motivate both volunteers and contributors, who have to date ponied up $4 million for the fight.

"Both candidates are still in campaign mode, so they've got to react as issues like missing ballots, rejected absentees and challenges arise," she said. "In a P.R. sense, they're laying the groundwork so the public isn't surprised when they go to court while it helps them raise tons of money."

Franken immediately embraced the automatically triggered recount, saying that it was the best way to ensure that all Minnesotans' votes would be counted and that "this election will be decided by the voters, not by the candidates."

Coleman initially declared victory, saying the morning after the election that he was "humbled and grateful for the victory that the voters gave us last night." He also called on Franken to waive the recount, explaining, "I just think the need for the healing process is so important."

Low profiles

Since then, to a remarkable degree, the candidates themselves have kept low profiles.

On Nov. 18, the day before the recount began, Coleman offered this muted assessment: "I have confidence that we will do this the Minnesota way." The next day, Franken was equally low-key: "No one has a claim on the seat. The voters have a claim on the seat."

The candidates' surrogates have been consistently more barbed in their assessment of the process. And from far away in Washington, even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has weighed in a couple of times, echoing the Franken line.

When the state Canvassing Board gave the green light to the recount by certifying the initial statewide vote count, Reid called it "one step in a process to ensure every Minnesotan's vote is counted."

But when the Franken campaign failed to persuade board members to include rejected absentee ballots in the recount and Marc Elias, Franken's lead recount lawyer, invoked the possibility of the Senate itself deciding the outcome, Reid again chimed in about voters being "disenfranchised."

The rules, to be sure, allow the Senate a role. The U.S. Constitution gives each house of Congress broad authority to judge the elections and qualifications of its members.

But recount rhetoric might influence how such authority is used.

"It's all aimed at winning hearts and minds," said Schultz. "Both [campaigns] are trying to legitimize their positions politically."