Ambitious crusader
It's hard not to notice Norm Coleman these days. The rise to prominence in Washington of the junior senator from Minnesota has been sharp and swift. He's close to the president. He's on trips to Southeast Asia with the majority leader, and last month, after only two years in the Senate, he made a nearly successful bid to chair the GOP Senate campaign committee in the new Congress, losing by a single vote. But it is his dogged pursuit of alleged corruption in the United Nations' former oil-for-food program in Iraq that has propelled Coleman into the public consciousness as Washington's chief tormentor of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Coleman has called for Annan's resignation, and the senator is expected to announce shortly a new round of hearings into what he contends is a multibillion-dollar scheme of bribes and kickbacks. The program allowed Iraq to sell embargoed oil to buy food and medicine; a Security Council panel was supposed to ensure that the cash was not used to rearm Iraq. Coleman believes that the alleged fraud allowed Saddam Hussein to retain his grip on power and that the funds may now be available to the Iraqi insurgents. "I'd like to find out if this money is fueling the insurgency in Iraq and cut it off," he says. After one hearing last fall, Coleman estimated that more than $21 billion was siphoned from the program, most of it on Annan's watch. Critics challenge that number and accuse Coleman of grandstanding; recently released U.N. audits suggest the fraud might be on a smaller scale. But the senator is undeterred. "We fund 22 percent of the U.N. operating budget, so we have a stake in making sure that things we invest in are working efficiently. . . . I hope we can get to the bottom of it," says Coleman. But both admirers and detractors wonder whether Coleman's desire to get to the bottom of the U.N. allegations is just a vehicle to take him to the top.
Up the ladder. "He's very ambitious, and his recent actions really illustrate that," says Steven Schier, a professor of political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. "I think you are going to see more of this, because I think this is a fellow who wants to run for the highest office you can find, and he's not going to stop."
A transplanted New Yorker who improbably served two terms as mayor of St. Paul, Minn., Coleman always seems to be in the middle of the action. He won one of the nastiest races of the 2002 campaign with 50 percent of the vote, defeating former Vice President Walter Mondale, who had stepped in as a Democratic standard-bearer after the incumbent senator, Paul Wellstone, was killed in a plane crash 11 days before the election.
From the very beginning, Coleman won admiration not just for his political skills and tenacity but for his resilience in the face of public setbacks and family tragedy. "He's a very talented politician," says Ron Ebensteiner, chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party. "What he was particularly good at was working across party lines, getting people of all parties, races, ethnicities going in the same direction."
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