Greens running against Democrats, and maybe giving Republicans the edge? Anyone who thinks we'll have to wait till the Bush-Gore rematch in 2004 to get into that can of worms had better look at Minnesota this year. Here's Senator Paul Wellstone bidding for a third term, with the tiny Democratic majority in the Senate as the stake. Writing in The Nation, John Nichols sets the bar even higher. "His race," Nichols wrote tremulously this spring, "is being read as a measure of the potency of progressive politics in America."

Wellstone's opponent is Norm Coleman, former mayor of St. Paul and enjoying all the endorsements and swag the RNC can throw in his direction. The odds are against Wellstone. Coleman is a lot tougher than the senile Rudy Boschwitz, whom Wellstone beat in 1996, and many Minnesotans aren't enchanted about his breach of a pledge that year to hold himself to two terms.

But ignoring Wellstone's dubious future, liberals are now screaming about "the spoiler," who takes the form of Ed McGaa, a Sioux born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a Marine Corps vet of the wars in both Korea and Vietnam, an attorney and author of numerous books on Native American religion. The Minnesota Green Party picked him as its candidate on May 18 at a convention of some 600, a lively affair in which real politics actually took place in the form of debates, resolutions, nomination fights and the kindred impedimenta of democracy.

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