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The 2006 campaign season was barely a glimmering on the horizon to most people when the first shock wave hit the state's DFL party. On March 18, Fifth District Representative Martinæ Sabo—a 27-year veteran of Congress, and a legendary bringer of the bacon by dint of his service on the powerful Ways and Means Committee—announced that he would retire at the end of his current term. Sabo's abrupt exit, just seven weeks before the DFL endorsing convention, touched off a succession scrum that quickly turned into a virtual Who's Who of established party regulars, including longtime Sabo aide and former state party chair Mike Erlandson, Minneapolis City Council members Paul Ostrow and Gary Schiff, Hennepin County Commissioner Gail Dorfman, and former state Senator Ember Reichgott Junge.

In all, no fewer than 11 DFLers put their eyes on the prize in the weeks following Sabo's withdrawal. The expansive slate of candidates attested to the fact that the Fifth is not just any congressional district in the eyes of the Democratic Party. Encompassing Minneapolis and its near suburbs, the Fifth is the state's most liberal urban district and the DFL's greatest stronghold in this purple era of state politics. Claiming the party's post-Sabo mantle there is the closest thing to a lock on a long career in national politics, and the power and prestige that come with it, that any Minnesota Democrat could hope to find.

Shocking as Sabo's late departure may have been, an even bigger surprise awaited the DFL machine at the party's May 6 endorsing convention at St. Louis Park High School. Going in, the conventional wisdom dictated a tight contest between Gail Dorfman, Mike Erlandson, and Keith Ellison, a two-term state representative from north Minneapolis. It turned out to be no contest at all: Ellison ran roughshod over the rest of the field, polling twice as many delegate votes as anyone else on the first ballot and receiving the endorsement by unanimous acclaim after three ballots. His charismatic oratory and command of the issues excited the delegates, but he'd built his diverse, winning coalition by playing against type on identity politics. His nominating speeches were delivered by Allan Spear, the state's first gay legislator (now retired), who praised Ellison's early stand against the war in Iraq, and another lawmaker, Connie Bernardy, who was a Sunday school teacher and suburban mom. She reminded folks that Ellison "values hard work."

Ellison's endorsement seemed to augur a sea change for the party. For years, the DFL had been conferring its blessings on cautious dullards who wouldn't seem out of place in a powdered wig (Roger Moe, anybody?). Ellison, by contrast, was a 42-year-old black attorney who had entered public life as a student activist at the University of Minnesota and later headed the Legal Rights Center, a nonprofit organization that specialized in the defense of indigent clients. More notoriously, Ellison—who converted to Islam as a 19-year-old college student in 1983—played a prominent role in rallying the Minnesota contingent to the 1995 Million Man March, in which nearly a million African American men marched on Washington at the behest of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

The party's endorsement left Ellison poised to become not only the first black elected official Minnesota had sent to Washington, but also (according to U.S. Senate historian Donald Ritchie) the first Muslim ever elected to Congress. As a jubilant throng of Ellison supporters left the premises that day, Minneapolis Park Board member Annie Young stood off to the side, resting an ailing hip, and watched them go. She raised her eyebrows and sounded a prescient alarm. "They should enjoy it now and then get back to work," she said warily. "Keith is a black man with designs on a very powerful position. You know there will be attacks."

Keith Ellison has essentially been under siege ever since. Ellison himself is to blame for some of this. Valid questions have been raised about the chronically sloppy way he has handled his personal and campaign finances. But those who oppose Ellison's candidacy have supplemented those legitimate concerns with a barrage of diatribes and innuendo impugning his character in a much more insidious manner. By July 12, less than 10 weeks after Ellison secured his party's endorsement, the newsletter Politics in Minnesota, which strains to define conventional political wisdom in the state, brazenly called him a "dead man walking." With the make-or-break DFL primary still two long months away, PIM's editors suggested that the best way for Ellison to "rehabilitate his career" was to simply abandon his bid for Congress and refile for his local legislative seat before the July 18 deadline. Yet today, less than two weeks before the primary that will almost certainly produce the next congressperson in this "safe" Democratic district, the polls and pundits indicate that Ellison is locked in a four-way contest that's too close to call.

 

The mud started flying just days after Ellison's surprise convention win. The first major barrage came early the following week, when an anonymously circulated email quoting the candidate's past pronouncements on race in America and detailing his tenuous, guilt-by-association ties to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam was sent to a wide range of local politicos and news organizations. A number of right-wing blogs began flogging Ellison for his alleged anti-Semitism, and by the following weekend those charges were being reported in mainstream media.

 

By his own admission, Ellison did not take the anti-Semitism charges seriously at first. He had never been a member of Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, and he believed—too readily, it turned out—that most people would understand there was a distinction between Farrakhan's extremist and undeniably anti-Semitic views and the mainstream of Islam, just as there was a distinction between the Moral Majority and the mainstream of Christianity.

Fortunately he had a number of Jewish friends to serve as a sounding board, and they told him he would have to respond. Among the most important was State Rep. Frank Hornstein from south Minneapolis, who sat next to Ellison at the Capitol when the two were incoming freshmen legislators four years ago. Their friendship was minted in February 2003 during a 90-minute car ride to a cheese factory in Litchfield after both accepted the challenge from a rural Republican colleague to come learn about agricultural issues. It was enhanced a few months later on the House floor, when Hornstein watched Ellison take the lead role in the ethics case against Arlon Lindner, who had claimed gays and lesbians weren't persecuted during the Holocaust. Hornstein's mother was a Holocaust survivor. His wife is the senior rabbi at Temple Israel, one of the largest synagogues in the metro. Since 9/11, the mosque Ellison belongs to, Masjid An-Nur, has frequently engaged the Jewish community through Temple Israel.

"I told him I thought this Farrakhan stuff was serious and important to address. He kind of laid it on the line in terms of, 'This is what I said and what I did,' and I said, well, it's important to get that in writing. And he wrote a letter to the Jewish Community Relations Council. This was still early, not long after his endorsement," Hornstein says. The May 28 letter specifically cites not only Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, but a number of other people and situations named in the blogs as evidence of Ellison's bigotry. The letter uses unequivocal words like "reject and condemn" to describe his feelings toward advocates of anti-Semitism. "What struck me is at the end of the letter when he says, 'Whatever comes out of this, I want to be a part of improving Black-Jewish relations,'" Hornstein says. "I've heard him repeat that many times and know it to be true."

Ten days after Ellison submitted his letter to the JCRC, the number-two person in the al Qaeda hierarchy, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, was killed in a bombing in Iraq. The weblog Kennedy vs. the Machine (as the name suggests, it was created to boost the candidacy of Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Mark Kennedy) posted Zarqawi's picture over the caption, "Condolences can be sent to Ellison HQ." KvM operator Gary M. Miller justified this heinous stunt by claiming that Zarqawi and Ellison have a "shared history of anti-Semitism."

As the operator of a website promoting Republican Mark Kennedy was equating Ellison with a mass-murdering Muslim terrorist, Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten was taking the case for Ellison's anti-Semitism into the mainstream media. Near the end of a column titled "Let's not forget Ellison's support of Nation of Islam," Kersten wrote, "Imagine that a Republican seeks his party's endorsement for the U.S. House of Representatives, despite having been allied with a white supremacist organization just a decade earlier...That man wouldn't get his party's endorsement."

Sylvia Kaplan read those words and thought, "What in the world are we doing agreeing with Katherine Kersten on this stuff?" Sylvia's husband, lawyer Sam Kaplan, is a past president of the Minnesota Jewish Federation. They have three children currently living in Israel. They are also among the most prominent fundraisers for Democratic candidates in the state. They were traveling in China when Sabo announced his retirement, and came home to find phone messages from 11 prospective candidates currying their support.

The Kaplans had initially favored City Councilwoman Lisa Goodman for the Fifth District, but she chose not to run. They were favorably disposed toward Gail Dorfman, but did not think she could win the endorsement, and figured they'd bide their time before committing to a candidate. After Ellison won over the delegates, it wasn't hard to find operatives of his DFL primary opponents spreading the word that the Kaplans were very unhappy about the choice. Sylvia says some of this stemmed from Ellison's support for former Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Thandiwe Peebles, who was forced to resign in February. And then there was the internet drumbeat. "Like other people," notes Kaplan, "we read the blogs, which made it sound like Keith was very close to Farrakhan."

Mutual friends of Ellison and the Kaplans began lobbying gently for a meeting. They included Hornstein, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, and, perhaps most influentially, Art Himmelman. A consultant whose business card reads, "Helping communities work collaboratively for social justice," Himmelman is the man who first introduced the Kaplans to the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone. By the second weekend in June, a meeting had been tentatively set up in Rochester, where the Kaplans and Ellison were attending the state DFL convention. The three met on the day after Kersten's anti-Semitism column appeared in the paper.

"I have to admit, as we sat and talked to him for two hours, our minds flashed back 16 years and our first long conversation with Paul Wellstone," Sam says. "Sylvia and I know each other well enough that we can both feel where the other is headed. And here was a guy who didn't have an agenda as much as what came through to us was he believes in social justice and the common good, which is a Jewish tradition."

"He was clearly our kind of candidate," says Sylvia. "He was genuine. There was a lot of laughter and he was not pandering to us, not a salesman in that sense. It was a conversation about how he looks at the world and came to the conclusions he came to. And he listened, which is how Paul seduced us. It's like riffs in jazz: You say something, they say something and you go with it, but if a candidate doesn't listen, you can't do that. He clarified a number of things and admitted to some mistakes."

"And once we got to know him," Sam adds, "there is an appeal that we might send off a black Muslim to Washington, that we could be proud to be associated with that kind of change. I do think it's important that while the other candidates struggled to find the right words to deal with Iraq, Keith has been right out front, saying we need to stop this."

At the end of the meeting, they wrote Ellison a check, and set up a mammoth fundraiser attended by Walter Mondale, Rybak, and others, in late July. "It was a very important meeting," Ellison says. "There aren't many people who really care about people and have the means and the desire to really do something about it, and they are among those people. But more than that, they have good insights. They don't act like, 'I'm rich and you're not.' You can disagree with them. They're cool people, and regardless of what happens in this campaign, I'm better off having gotten to know them better."

But Ellison couldn't sit down and talk with everyone for two hours. With the blogs and Kersten putting blood in the water, it was only a matter of time before other members of the mainstream media started asking Ellison when he stopped being an anti-Semite. The issue came to dominate the campaign. On June 28, the Strib began a long feature story on the race by stating, "It seems that state Rep. Keith Ellison's campaign for Congress so far amounts to answering one question: How close was he to the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan?" A day earlier, Strib columnist Doug Grow told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, "The whole campaign has been devoted to Ellison explaining his past relation to Farrakhan."

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