The Minnesota court ruling awarding a disputed U.S. Senate seat to Democrat  Al Franken is eliciting predictable reactions along party lines. Like his self-affirming "Saturday Night Live" character Stuart Smalley, Franken is good enough and smart enough to serve in the Senate (even though Republicans don't like him). "Good enough" is also a fair description of his victory, which is still being contested by former Sen. Norm Coleman.

Franken's victory -- like George W. Bush's in Florida in 2000  -- suggests another "enough" cliche: "Close enough for government work." Which is another way of saying that in such a close race whether Franken beat Coleman is ultimately unknowable. This is a useful reminder of a larger point: that legitimacy in democratic politics is a slippery and subjective idea.

Minnesota Republicans may think it unjust that they will be represented by Franken because of a misinterpretation of a few absentee ballots. But other Minnesotans may consider Franken illegitimate for another reason: that he won only a plurality of the vote because of the presence in his race of a third-party candidate, former Sen. Dean Barkley. So a truly democratic election would have provided for a runoff? Not so fast. Jesse Jackson argued (admittedly a generation ago and in the context of primaries) that runoff elections were quasi-racist, at least in the South, where he feared a black candidate who finished first in the original election would be edged out by a white candifdate when the field was winnowed to two.

In defense of Jackson, his position on runoffs isn't different in kind from notions we accept uncritically -- such as that Congress should be composed of seats won by the candidate who got a majority (or a plurality) of the vote. Winner-take-all is American as apple pie (it's called "first past the post" in Britain), but it's less democratic than the various forms of proportional representation used in some European countries and in Israel.

If the U.S. followed the Israeli system, in which even small parties are represented in the Knesset in proportion to the votes they receive, we'd have a more representative Congress -- and a more dysfunctional one, with Democrats and Republicans sharing space with Libertarians, Afrocentrists, Aryan Nationers, creationists, a few Marxists, maybe even a PETA representative or two.

Al Franken's supporters, like George Bush's in 2000, are loath to argue that some things are more important than democracy. But that's the best argument for sending Franken to Washington even if only God knows if he edged Coleman. The consolation for Coleman voters is that, even if their man "really" won, this wouldn't be the first time that democracy was trumped by other imperatives. Like stable government, two-party rule and giving Minnesota a second senator.

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