With his sleeves rolled up, hunched over his guitar, his eyes drill into his left-hand fingers, which keep getting tripped up during a transition in Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."
Each time, Coleman winces slightly with a purse of his lips and a cock of his head.
It's a new tune for Coleman, 48, who will be sworn in Monday for a second four-year term as St. Paul's mayor after cruising to victory in November. Coleman could have been giving his inaugural address as a candidate for governor in 2010 amid a crowded field, but he dropped out of consideration before formally entering the race, citing a job not finished in the capital city where he's lived his whole life.
Despite the Democrat's easy victory over Republican-endorsed Eva Ng, his first term wasn't cake. The tattered economy has racked the city with a plague of vacant houses and delayed construction projects. And he instituted a series of tax increases while cutting services — drawing sharp criticism from the city's Republican and Libertarian quarters — on the promise of sound fiscal planning in the long term.
The next four years likely will present more opportunity to establish the legacy of Chris Coleman than did his first four, and those closest to him say he seems prepared.
Now, free from the constraints of a statewide campaign and without any significant political opposition at home, Coleman's future lies before
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him like a largely blank sheet of music paper. The next several years are penciled in with refrains similar to those of his first term — build Central Corridor, integrate services for kids, revitalize downtown — but beyond that?
He often jokes about a career as a fishing guide out West or up North — asides his wife, Connie, doesn't disregard. And he recently confided in a brother that his decision not to run for governor allowed him to spend the next evening with his daughter discussing her college plans, at length — an occasion that was probably overdue. It prompted Coleman to remark to his brother Patrick, "Maybe this is my purpose in life: to give my daughter the coolest life she can have."
Yet, few close to Coleman think he's about to snuff out his political star — and many say his appetite for higher office isn't sated.
"I always believed he was intended to be mayor and that he is intended to be governor," says Ann Mulholland, Coleman's deputy mayor and a close friend whose political career has been in lockstep with Coleman's practically since the day they met nearly 20 years ago. "I really believe he will make a great governor someday."
On this day, however, as his inauguration approaches, he's focused on learning a tricky tune.
His private guitar instructor, McNally Smith College of Music chairman of the board and co-founder Jack McNally, coaxes him on in a conversation of mumbled phrases amid plucked notes.
"Try the F like this," McNally says as Coleman nods, his eyes darting to McNally's guitar, where the chords flow perfectly.
"Mmm," Coleman murmurs as he echoes the notes. "Actually ... yeah." Coleman successfully plays through the troublesome stretch, McNally's cowboy boot thumping time on the maple floors of his office of the Exchange Building in St. Paul. The pair bump fists, then move on to some blues techniques.
Coleman approached McNally about lessons shortly after he took office in 2005 after ousting Mayor Randy Kelly.
"I think I said, 'Dude, I'll give you lessons for the rest of your life if you want,' " recalls McNally, who got to know Coleman when he was a St. Paul City Council member and one of the champions of the expanding music school's move to Cedar and Exchange streets downtown. "He really believed in the college. If it weren't for him, I don't know if it would have happened. I'd do anything for him."
Music and politics. And the outdoors. Those are the 48-year-old mayor's passions, according to friends, family and colleagues who say all can be traced to his upbringing.
'SHADOW'
His mother, Bridget Coleman, was by one sibling's account an "untrained musical genius" who deserves credit for the musical gene in her offspring, among them a professional musician, Brendan, who lives in the Czech Republic.
But the family business was politics, and it was his father, Nicholas, who most strongly influenced Chris Coleman. From his first election to the Minnesota Senate in 1962, Nick Coleman led his Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as minority leader and then as majority leader, and became one of the most powerful DFLers in the state before his death from leukemia in 1981.
Patrick Coleman, the second-eldest child, said he believes the strong paternal pull on Chris, the second youngest, was due to Chris' age.
"The older kids were old enough to know how painful it was to have a political father and, in some ways, an absent father," says Patrick Coleman, who is curator of books for the Minnesota Historical Society. "Chris was old enough to understand some politics but too young to see that strain."
"He became majority leader when I was 10 and held it through the time I was in college, so through my formative years, he was obviously a very significant player in what was happening in the state," Chris Coleman says of his father. Of the seven children in the Irish-American household, Coleman says, "I was the one who most wanted to follow in dad's footsteps."
It earned him the nickname "Shadow," and the joke among family and friends goes something like this: "The old man was standing at the toilet, taking a leak, and there was Chris, standing right behind him, doing the same." The tale appears to be apocryphal, but the truth behind it remains.
Chris Coleman says his father left him with a profound impression of public service by lawmakers.
"There was never any discussion of 'I get this' or 'I get that,' " Coleman says. "It was always about using this position to make a difference in the world."
Watching her father lead the city appears to be having an influence on Coleman's daughter, Molly, who helped organize Sen. Al Franken's Facebook campaign page and is on the executive board of the Young Democrats of America High School Caucus. She was planning to delay entering college for a year to work on her dad's gubernatorial campaign. "Telling Molly he wasn't running — that was the hardest call he had to make," Connie Coleman says.
OUT WEST AND UP NORTH
Before Christopher Brien Coleman walked in his father's political footsteps, he hiked in his father's path. As a young man and the son of a Great Northern Railroad employee, Nick Coleman had worked in a lodge in Glacier National Park in Montana.
Chris Coleman was about 20 when his father was diagnosed with leukemia and given six months to live.
"One of the first things he said after he told the family was, he turned to me and he says, 'And you're going out to Glacier,' " Chris Coleman recalls. "I said, 'No, I'm not.' He said, 'Yes, you are.'
"He knew it was important, but I don't think even he could imagine how important those summers became for me."
Coleman spent the next three summers out West, working at lodges in Glacier and Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. It was his first time away from home, and he points to those summers as cementing his love of the outdoors and as the basis for his own family's tradition of getting away.
"I like to brag that both my kids were in Glacier National Park before they were 9 months old," he says. Then, without changing his reflective tone, he adds: "My kids will take their kids to Aruba or something like that."
It's that kind of dry wit — honed over years of verbal sparring with four brothers — that charmed Connie Johnson. The pair met — or were subtly set up, depending on who's telling the story — when she was a paralegal and Coleman was a law student clerking in the Hennepin County public defender's office.
Their first date was at the Cabooze bar in Minneapolis to the music of Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans. (It's the same stage where years later, Coleman would jam with David Hidalgo and Louie Perez of Los Lobos, whose signatures emblazon the mayor's guitar.)
"I can't say it was love at first sight," Connie recalls. "But as I got to know him, it was his intellect and his humor. I don't think most people realize how intelligent Chris really is." They married about a year later.
Coleman's humor is remarkable for an elected official in that he'll deadpan a line, often a dig, and a good portion of the room won't get it — or will wonder whether it was intended as humor at all.
"I always warn him to look who's over his shoulder," his brother Patrick says. "But he never does."
The mayor excuses himself: "You can never take yourself too seriously. ... Just remember: Everything I say is tongue-in-cheek."
His friends roundly praise his humor, but it's been known to cause fretting among his handlers. When he was (unofficially) running for governor, angling for DFL insiders whose support is needed early in a campaign, he couldn't afford to have jokes fall flat, or worse.
"It requires a level of personal discipline that isn't fun," says Mulholland, who serves as both a friend and a handler. "He was willing to do it, to dial it back. But that was really hard for me, to not have him being as openly the Chris that I love."
THE POLITICIAN EMERGES
Mulholland met Coleman in 1991 at a union convention for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Mulholland worked for AFSCME. Later that year, as Mulholland and her husband became friends with the Colemans, Mulholland told Coleman, "You're going to be mayor, and I'm going to be your deputy and run the show."
At the time, Coleman had never run for elected office, and the only attribution the Pioneer Press granted him when he penned a letter to the editor was "attorney and Frogtown neighborhood activist."
But Mulholland said that while their friendship was based on the couples spending time outdoors with their growing families and love of music, she saw something in Coleman that made her certain he would become a leader.
"He has a unique passion for the city," she says. "Sure, he cares about health care and policy — profoundly — but he really understands the uniqueness of place. ... He can see how policy can combine with social fabric to affect the quality of life."
Six years later, it was his opposition to a proposed metal shredder in the Colemans' West Side neighborhood that prompted him to run for city council.
But the pull to follow his father into lawmaking was strong. An ailing Rep. Bruce Vento announced he wouldn't seek re-election to the 4th Congressional District. Coleman had interned for Vento and was inspired by his environmental policies. Over Mulholland's objections, Coleman ran for Congress.
Betty McCollum trounced Coleman and two others in the DFL primary.
"I'm glad I ran, and I'm glad I lost," Coleman says. "I learned what it takes to run a campaign, but I was relieved, because I had two young kids and I would have had to trade time between here and D.C."
Neighborhood issues and city policies — such as Kelly's refusal to raise taxes when Coleman saw a maintenance backlog growing and costs for services rising — continued to bother Coleman. He gradually came to believe he could have the most influence in the city he was in, not Congress. "When you're mayor, it's right in your home," he says. "As a mayor, you can get things done. It's more diffuse in D.C."
Mulholland said she realized years later the value of Coleman's failed run for Congress. "There's no question that Chris' exploration of public service helped him define how he was best intended to serve," she says.
In 2005, he handily defeated Kelly, though many believe the margin had less to do with city policy than with Kelly's endorsement of Republican President George Bush.
AWAKENING
"Within a few weeks of being elected, the Wall Street Journal reported the Ford plant would close," Coleman recalls.
And so would begin his first term, which history might look back on as defined more by the national economic slide than by any mayoral decisions. Grand plans for the Penfield high-rise and the former West Publishing building were shelved, the housing crisis gained steam, and Gov. Tim Pawlenty reduced state aid to municipal coffers.
Connie Coleman said the transition from city council to mayor meant changes at home as well.
The couple used to throw parties at their home. Entertaining has now largely gone away.
"I'm the extrovert," says the city's first lady, a real estate agent with Edina Realty. "That's why I do what I do. Chris is the introvert. He does need quiet, especially with the demands of being mayor."
The bagpipes are hardly quiet.
Coleman's accomplished bagpipe playing brought tears at police funerals, cheers when he "opened" for Rod Stewart at the Xcel Energy Center and jeers from close friends — and Coleman himself.
"It's my stupid human trick," he quips.
He bought a guitar for his son, Aidan, and decided to pick one up himself.
"I wish I had done it years ago," he says. "It helps me clear my head."
When gaps appear in his schedule — as short as 15 minutes — Coleman sometimes stops at home and practices, his wife says.
While he deems the city's hosting of the Republican National Convention in 2008 a success, the violence and mass arrests that took place in the streets of St. Paul clearly bothered Coleman.
"At the end of the RNC, he spent a lot of time playing the guitar," Mulholland says.
Patrick Coleman, who initially discouraged his little brother from running for city council, says Chris Coleman has surprised him as he's grown comfortable being mayor.
"He's an entirely more sophisticated person than he was four years ago," the older brother says. "For Christmas, he gave me a four-volume CD of Ella Fitzgerald. He's always been a Bruce Springsteen rocker type, but I think he's really opened up.
"He's really blossomed. If he says he's going to learn the guitar, you don't want to bet against him. He's on a roll."
MAYORAL MUSIC PICKS
From St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman's iPod, his 10 most-played songs:
1. "Barricades of Heaven," Jackson Browne
2. "Buffalo River Home," John Hiatt
3. "Fisherman's Blues," The Water Boys
4. "Into the Mystic," Van Morrison
5. "Love is the Law," The Suburbs
6. "Not Ready to Make Nice," Dixie Chicks
7. "Persuasion," Richard Thompson
8. "The Story," Brandi Carlile
9. "Thunder Road," Bruce Springsteen
10. "The Worst Day Since Yesterday," Flogging Molly
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