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As if Michele Bachmann’s 2010 re-election battle wasn’t already going to be a doozy, it’s begun shaping up as a proxy war between the forces of U.S. Sen. Al Franken and the man he bested in Minnesota’s recount, former Sen. Norm Coleman. “The eyes of the nation — and Michele Bachmann’s right-wing allies — will be on this race,” Franken wrote in an email today on behalf of Bachmann rival Tarryl Clark. ”I have no doubt [Bachmann] is going to get re-elected by her constituents,” Coleman told an audience at Harvard University Tuesday night.

Coleman wrote his own fundraising letter on behalf of Bachmann in September. Franken was a listed co-host for a fundraising event for Clark, a DFL Party state senator, in Minneapolis last week. Maureen Reed is also mounting a 2010 challenge to Bachmann.

Coleman’s comments Tuesday came in response to a question from his Harvard audience about whether “death bed” rhetoric and “Nazi imagery” were hurting the Republican Party. “I don’t think that the signs you mention are part of the party or central to the discussion,” Coleman countered.

In the course of his response, Coleman brought up “the Michele Bachmanns out there.” He disputed a link between extreme rhetoric and elected officials or the Tea Party movement. “Your basic notion is mistaken,” he said. “You’re taking something way out on the fringe and you’re applying it to the legitimate anger that folks have.”

But earlier, Coleman seemed ready to harness anger himself with this line in his speech: “Pity the politician who comes between a citizen and their constitutional Second Amendment rights.”

Coleman, a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, is treading on Franken’s former stomping grounds: the Minnesota funnyman-turned-statesman was a math major at Harvard.

He has cast himself as someone who can bring young people into the Republican Party, showing off his savvy by naming things like travel agents and 8-track tapes that the students in his audience don’t use. Besides, he asserted, young people don’t deal with social issues on a day-to-day basis. “Very rarely are you going to think about what’s going to happen on Roe v. Wade today,” Coleman said.

Coleman said he looks for middle ground on social issues. He advocated “doing those things that support young women so they don’t have to have an abortion.” Gay marriage is “a pretty narrow issue,” he said, citing civil unions as a possible compromise on the more contentious issue of how to define marriage.

“The philosophy of conservatives really is more in line with your generation,” Coleman said. “I just think we haven’t done a good job of articulating it.”

Coleman articulated this reason for having lost his re-election battle to Franken last year: his yes vote on bailout bills to stave off a depression in October 2008. “But for the collapse of the economy, I don’t think the race would have been close,” he said.