Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  Even better was the reaction I was getting from readers. When I traveled around the country on the book tour, progressives would come up to me and say things like, “Thank you,” or “It’s about time somebody took these guys on,” or “Thank you—it’s about time somebody took these guys on.”

  This was new. I’d always thought there was nothing better than hearing people laugh. But hearing people tell me that they were not only entertained, but also energized to go out and take these guys on themselves, was thrilling.

  It felt good to land on my feet. And made it a lot easier to laugh along with Norm on “Update.” Hey, I’m human.

  Chapter 6

  Paul

  After the success of the Rush book, I started getting gigs on the lucrative lecture circuit. It turns out there aren’t that many speakers who know a whole lot about politics and are also funny. Usually, this meant being flown first class to Scottsdale or Palm Springs or Vail to speak to a corporate conference on real estate investment trusts or reinsurance or how to get kids in third world countries to drink more Sprite.

  But I also became a popular speaker on the significantly less lucrative (as in, I didn’t get paid) national progressive circuit. And my favorite Democrat to speak for was Paul Wellstone.

  My parents introduced me to Paul back in 1990, when he first ran for the Senate. By then, Dad had made the transition from Jacob Javits Republican to George McGovern Democrat.* In 1990, he was eighty-two and part of a senior citizens’ theater troupe for Wellstone that toured nursing homes. I never saw their show. But Dad had Paget’s disease, a softening of the bones, so I imagine the choreography was somewhat limited.

  Paul was a little guy. And he was a fighter. Like me, Paul was a high school wrestler. Unlike me, he was a very good high school wrestler, and at the University of North Carolina was the Atlantic Coast Conference champion at the 126-pound level in 1964 and was subsequently inducted into the College Wrestling Hall of Fame, located in Wrestlingville, USA, and very much worth a visit if you’re in the area.

  Wellstone brought his wrestler’s energy and intensity to his activism. While teaching political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in the early ’70s, he organized poor single parents to fight for a publicly funded day care center, public housing, and free school lunches.

  Paul kept getting arrested: for protesting the Vietnam War, for protesting farm foreclosures, for selling uppers to other wrestlers.* After he picketed with strikers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, Carleton College fired him. But after Carleton students staged a protest, the college reinstated him and gave him tenure. Paul Wellstone remains the youngest tenured professor in the school’s history.

  In 1990, Paul won a long-shot race against sitting senator Rudy Boschwitz, even though Paul was outspent by a seven-to-one margin. Boschwitz was the only incumbent U.S. senator to lose that year, in large part because Paul ran an energetic grassroots campaign. He even had a senior citizens’ troupe perform at nursing homes!

  As a senator, Paul fought for the poor and dispossessed, for homeless vets, for people suffering from mental illness. “Politics,” he would say, “is not about power. Politics is not about money. Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives.” And that’s what he tried to do every day he served in the United States Senate.

  The last time I campaigned for Paul Wellstone was at the University Club in St. Paul, about eight weeks before the 2002 midterm election. Paul was in the middle of a very tight, very bitter race with former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, who had been handpicked by the Bush team to run against him.

  As you may recall, at the time, the White House was pushing Congress to grant President Bush authority to go to war against Iraq. On October 2, 2002, just a little over a month before the election, Paul Wellstone became the only incumbent senator up for reelection to come out against the war. At the time, with war fever running high and pretextual lies coming fast and furious, this was pretty close to political suicide. That day Paul told friends in the Senate and in Minnesota that he understood the vote would probably cost him his seat. As it turns out, even though a majority of Minnesotans supported going to war in Iraq, they respected Paul’s principled vote, and he moved ahead of Coleman in the polls.

  The people of Minnesota value a politician who believes what he says and says what he believes and votes that way. Paul never prevaricated. And Minnesotans always knew where Paul Wellstone stood.

  Minnesotans also knew Paul’s heart. Many of them had a personal story about how his warmth, his humility, or his wit had touched their lives on a level that had nothing to do with politics. Here’s mine.

  That evening at the University Club—the last time I saw my friend—the first thing he said to me, in the thick of a battle for his political life, was, “How’s your mom?” As it so happened, I had just come from her nursing home in Minneapolis, where in her room Mom kept a photo of Paul signed by him to her: “Phoebe, Keep fighting! Paul.”

  “Well, there are good days and bad days,” I told Paul. As he knew, she was suffering from sporadic dementia. “And today was a bad day. It was tough. I couldn’t even have a conversation with her.”

  Paul nodded, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “You know, touch means so much.”

  That was Paul. “Touch means so much.”

  Two weeks after the vote on the war, Paul and his wife, Sheila, and their daughter, Marcia, died in an airplane crash in northern Minnesota along with three staffers, Tom Lapic, Mary McEvoy, and Will McLaughlin, and pilots Richard Conry and Michael Guess.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but Paul’s death would end up being part of the story of how I came to be a senator, serving in the same seat he held for twelve years.

  But while I certainly would never have run for the Senate if Paul hadn’t died, I also don’t think I would have run had I not known him in life. Paul’s greatest contribution to the progressive cause wasn’t what he accomplished in the Senate (although he accomplished a lot). It’s the way he inspired others to take action, and taught them to be effective, and gave them the confidence to stand up and shout about what they believed in.

  The more time you spent around Paul, the more his energy, and his passion, and his courage infected you and made you think you could make a difference, too.

  And to this day, if you travel around Minnesota and meet people who work in progressive politics, you’ll hear many of them explain that they do it because of Paul.

  Some of them were part of his campaign and never stopped working for change even after he was gone, as a way to keep their hero’s memory alive.

  Some of them trained with Wellstone Action, the nonprofit that became one of Paul’s legacies, teaching people how to organize for progress.

  And some are too young to have ever really known him—but they’re still inspired by his courage and his energy, the way this happy warrior never forgot that “politics is about the improvement of people’s lives.”

  I can’t think of a better tribute to Paul’s life than the fact that more than a decade after his death, the passion he brought to politics is still alive. There are a lot of people who are more politically active than they ever thought they’d be because they love who Paul was and what he stood for, and felt called to do their part to carry forward the fights he led.

  I’m one of them.

  Chapter 7

  A 99 Percent Improvement

  In April 2003, I was scanning political stories on my laptop when I noticed a profile of Minnesota senator Norm Coleman in Roll Call, one of the Capitol Hill dailies. It was the first profile of Coleman, who had been in office just a little over three months. According to Roll Call, Norm had already become “an emerging star on the GOP’s rubber-chicken circuit.”

  I read on: “‘Most of it is because of beating Mondale,’ said Coleman as he gesticulated his points with an unlit cigar in his new Hart office.”

&
nbsp; Huh. As someone who had only ever gesticulated with an unlit cigar to make fun of people who gesticulate with unlit cigars, I got the impression that maybe Norm’s ascent to the world’s greatest deliberative body had gone to his head a bit.

  Then I read it: the sentence that would change my life.

  “To be very blunt, and God watch over Paul’s soul, I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone.”

  “I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone.” I’m sorry, but you don’t say that about anyone who died within the last six months. And, my God, you don’t say it about a guy who everyone agreed was a compassionate, tireless champion of the little guy, a loving husband and father, and a colleague whom every senator recognized for his passion and decency.

  Until that exact moment, I had never considered running for political office.* But when I read that quote on the Roll Call website, my immediate thought was this: “Somebody’s got to beat this guy.”

  Except I didn’t think exactly that. Instead of “guy,” I thought “jerk.”

  Except I didn’t think that, either. It was something else. I can’t write it in this book. But it’s not as bad as you might think. Okay, it was “bastard.” No, it wasn’t. It was worse than that.

  Fine, it was “dingus.”USS “Somebody’s got to beat this dingus.”USS That’s what I thought.†

  Now, that’s a really bad reason to run for office. And over time it would become less and less about beating Norm Coleman, and more and more about the people of Minnesota. By the time I clobbered him on election day (in the narrowest clobbering in political history), I had almost forgotten that the germ of the idea to run had come from such a petty place.

  And anyway, at the time, I didn’t think that the “somebody” who was going to beat this guy would end up being me. True, for a brief moment, I did find myself considering the fact that Franni and I were about to be empty nesters—our son, Joe, was about to head off to college the next year. It would be easy for us to move back to Minnesota and explore the idea. Then again, being an empty nester is not a good reason to run for the Senate, either. It is, however, a great reason to take up a new hobby, such as gardening or paddle tennis, which can help ward off depression.

  In any event, I quickly set the thought aside. “After all,” I reminded myself, “first I have to finish this book, and then I’ve committed to doing a three-hour radio show five days a week.”

  How’s that for exposition?

  See, I was reading the article while sitting in my office at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where I was a fellow.

  When I accepted the position, I thought I was going to be a teaching fellow. But I wasn’t. I was just a fellow. They told me, however, that I could lead a study group on any subject I wanted. I asked if it was okay if I taught students how to research a satirical book on politics. They said sure. As it turns out, a lot of professors at Harvard teach students how to research their books.*

  The book, which became Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, would argue that the right-wing media had created a right-wing echo chamber that often intimidates the mainstream media into reporting its distortions and outright lies.

  The centerpiece of the book would be a chapter detailing how the right had exploited the Wellstone memorial, a long and boisterous event held shortly after his death—and shortly before the 2002 election—that reflected the deep passion that had animated Paul throughout his life, as well as the strong emotional connection so many people felt they had had with him.

  Republicans had promptly seized the opportunity to paint the memorial as an inappropriately partisan event. The Coleman campaign and its allies lied about everything from the content of the eulogies to the audience’s reaction, effectively hijacking Paul’s memorial for their own selfish partisan purposes by falsely accusing Democrats of hijacking it for our own selfish partisan purposes.*

  I still feel strongly about this. And so do lots and lots of other Minnesota Democrats. Losing Paul was a crushing blow. Losing Paul and then watching Republicans lie about his memorial service for political purposes was adding a despicable insult to a still-fresh injury, and watching their scheme succeed was dispiriting beyond words.

  To then see Norm Coleman immediately start bragging, not just about how he had ended Walter Mondale’s political career, but about how he was a better senator than Paul because he was so loyal to the Bush administration? It was almost too much.

  That’s why I had such a strong reaction to Coleman’s “99 percent improvement” line—and it’s a big part of the reason why, for me and for so many other Minnesota Democrats, my 2008 campaign would end up feeling like it was about more than just a Senate seat.

  As emotional and difficult as that Wellstone chapter was, the rest of the book was just fun. TeamFranken did a lot of fact-checking on well-known conservatives like Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney, and Bill O’Reilly, who up until then had merely been suspected of being congenital liars. The book put to rest forever any doubt that they and many other prominent right-wingers were very much indeed lying liars.

  But even before the book came out, something interesting happened. Bill O’Reilly and Fox News sued me. It was really just a simple misunderstanding. O’Reilly and the Fox legal team apparently didn’t understand that in America satire is protected by the First Amendment, even if the object of the satire doesn’t get it.

  In any event, Fox was literally laughed out of court. Literally. The New York Times headline read, “In Courtroom, Laughter at Fox and a Victory for Al Franken.” Aided by the free publicity generated by O’Reilly, Lies skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller list for months, selling over a million copies. (Arianna Huffington told me, “It’s as if Bill O’Reilly walked up to you and handed you a check for a million dollars.”)

  Readers responded to my thesis that the right’s complaint about a liberal bias in the mainstream media was disingenuous right-wing fiddle-faddle.USS They also liked the way I took on Bush’s policies, and his poppycockUSS claims, like, “The vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom.”

  On the book tour that fall, once again, I kept hearing things like, “Finally, someone’s taking it to these guys!” It felt good, even when they were visibly intoxicated. And every so often, someone would come up to me and say, “Why don’t you run for office?” Especially in Minnesota, where people were already thinking ahead to 2008, when Norm Coleman would have to run for reelection.

  But I had other things on my mind.

  While researching Lies, I learned that 22 percent of Americans were getting their news from talk radio, which meant right-wing talk radio. Liberals had ceded the airwaves to Rush Limbaugh and the Rush Limbaugh wannabes and also, in those days, the band Linkin Park, which was getting a lot of airplay. So in March 2003, while I was still researching and writing the book, I had taken the plunge and committed to hosting a daily three-hour progressive radio show.

  I quickly learned a few things about radio. Radio stations have “formats.” “Classic Rock” is a format. “Country” is a format. “Hot Adult Contemporary,” whatever that means, is a format.*

  “Talk Radio” is not a format. “Conservative Talk” is a format.

  Placing my show between Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (or between Mark Levin and Michael Savage) would have been like putting three hours of hip-hop on a station that otherwise carried a day of its polar opposite: hop-hip.

  So we had to invent a new format, “Progressive Radio.” And that meant creating an entire day of programming. And while we were at it, an entire national radio network, called Air America.

  The concept for my show was simple: We would not try to be the mirror image of right-wing radio, but its opposite.

  My executive producer, Billy Kimball, put together a staff of researchers, writers, and producers. Katherine Lanpher, a seasoned journalist and a fixture at Minnesota Public Radio, came a
board as my cohost. And on March 31, 2004, The Al Franken Show (then called The O’Franken Factor in an effort to further irritate Bill O’Reilly) went live:

  This is Al Franken speaking to you from thirty thousand feet under Dick Cheney’s bunker and this is Air America Radio… We have watched the right wing take over the Congress, White House, and courts and, as insidiously, the airwaves. We need a great watchdog to track them, and until one comes along, I’ll have to do.

  We laid down some basic rules right off the bat. No call-ins. No actors talking about politics (we called that “the Tim Robbins Rule”).

  And while we did some stuff that was just funny for the sake of funny, like when I played Strom Thurmond bragging about his sexual conquests (“Katherine, I screwed ’em allll!”), or when my old partner Tom Davis would come on as the CEO of a sketchy outfit called “Accountants Without Borders,” I also wanted ours to be a show that was serious about public policy. After all, as long as I would be committing to preparing for and doing a daily three-hour show, I might as well learn something.

  So we decided that our guests would be people who knew stuff.

  For example: You often hear people say that Elizabeth Warren was talking about income inequality before almost anyone else. Well, one of the places she was talking about it before almost anyone else was on our show. We’d have her on to discuss the 2005 bankruptcy bill (an outrageous handout to the credit card industry), conservative attacks on pensions and Social Security, and the general deterioration of the middle class.