Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  Kris and I would have this exact conversation or a slight variation (“Have you even gone to a showroom yet?!”) every time the tracker taped us getting out of the car. My fervent hope is that some Republican staffer had to spend two years of his or her precious life transcribing hundreds of hours of me trying to persuade Kris Dahl to get a pull-out couch, and that he or she is still wondering whether Kris ever ended up getting one.

  Well, good news: He did.

  No, he didn’t. There was never any pull-out couch.

  I figured out that one. What I didn’t get much better at was remembering people’s names.

  Some politicians, like Bill Clinton, are famously good at meeting someone once and then magically recalling their name when they meet three years later in an entirely different context, even if the other guy has lost* 150 pounds. Hubert Humphrey was like that. And so was Bernie Madoff. But most of us aren’t. Here’s a tip. If you want to get an officeholder to dislike you, go up to him or her and say, “I bet you don’t remember my name.”

  This is why the most important items at fund-raisers are name tags. I’ve gotten very good at turning to speak to someone, my eyes sweeping diagonally over their chest on the way up to their face, and saying, “Hey, Dennis, it’s great to see you!”

  Trouble remembering names is a wonderful bonding subject for U.S. senators and their spouses. In our first term, Franni and I had a semiregular dinner with three other couples: Diana and Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming; Jill and Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico; and Stephanie and Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska. It took me five dinners just to remember all of their names. And Mike Enzi still calls me “Arnie” now and then.

  I happen to love Stephanie Johanns, because she has the best laugh and, even better, laughs at almost anything I say. But one evening, Stephanie made all of us howl with laughter. We were discussing our most awkward moments blanking on the names of constituents. Stephanie painted a picture of a typical political event back in rural Nebraska with folks milling about, chatting and having a great time. Stephanie said she was talking to a small group and then turned around and saw a woman whom she knew, but couldn’t place. Stephanie said, “I knew I knew this woman, and I panicked. Then I figured out who she was and said, ‘Oh—hi, Mom!’”

  Probably the most ridiculous Politician Skill I had to learn, though, was how to “pivot,” a term which basically means “not answer questions.”

  For example, say a reporter asked me, “In the latest polls, you trail Norm Coleman by twenty points. How can you get DFLers to support you for the endorsement if you’re so far behind?”

  My instinct would be to answer the question.

  But that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to say, “When I go around our state, Minnesotans don’t talk about polls. They talk about their kids’ education, and how they’re worried that they’ll go bankrupt if someone in their family gets sick.” And so on.

  I understood the concept. For some reason, I was unable to use it. I had always been taught by my parents and my teachers to answer questions directly and completely. Which I did for the first ten months of my race, driving my team nuts. But of course, my team was right. Reporters would just use the most interesting (and, usually, unhelpful) sound bites in my lengthy responses to their questions, instead of writing about the message that we wanted to get out that particular day.

  Take for example, the “Hermann the German” incident.

  New Ulm, a beautiful small city in south-central Minnesota, was founded by German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. It boasts an enormous monument to Arminius, the Germanic warrior who led the slaughter of twelve to fifteen thousand Roman soldiers in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D., when Jesus was just a kid. Locals call the twenty-seven-foot statue “Hermann the German.”

  Hermann stands upon a seventy-foot base, so I was literally speaking in Hermann’s shadow while addressing a small crowd one fall afternoon in 2007. Now, you should understand that I grew up in St. Louis Park, known statewide as the Jewish suburb of Minneapolis.

  So here’s the situation. I’m a Jew. I grew up in St. Louis Park. I’m in New Ulm standing in the shadow of a massive monument to Hermann the German. And I had been in comedy for thirty-five years. So what immediately occurred to me was: “Now, I grew up in St. Louis Park, and we had a much smaller statue than Hermann the German here. Ours was called ‘Stu the Jew.’”*

  But I didn’t! I didn’t say it! There was a tracker there—and in the nanosecond that I made the decision not to go with “Stu the Jew,” I imagined that, put through the DeHumorizer™, Republicans could use the video to intimate that somehow I was blaming the good people of New Ulm for the Holocaust. And then it would get written up not as “Coleman Takes Hilarious Franken Joke Way, Way, Ridiculously out of Context,” but as “Republicans Slam Franken for Blaming Holocaust on New Ulm.”

  So instead I bit the inside of my cheek and talked about universal health care, climate change, and Norm Coleman’s dismal record in the Senate. I was on message! And as we walked back to the car that day, Kris resuming the conversation about his pull-out couch (“Plus, I’d have to drag it up all those stairs…”), I knew that what he was really saying was that he, and the rest of the team, were proud of me.

  But a few weeks later, a writer from New York magazine came to Minnesota to follow me around and do a story on my campaign. At one point the writer asked me, “Do you ever think of something funny and decide not to say it?”

  “Sure,” I answered.

  “For example?” she asked.

  And then I recounted the Stu the Jew story. Because, you see, she had asked me for an example. And of course, Stu the Jew appeared prominently in the article.

  Reading the Stu the Jew story in New York was a turning point. “Why did I do that?” I thought to myself (immediately after Jess and Andy asked me, “Why did you do that?”).

  My team pointed out that a perfectly good response to “For example?” would have been, “Gee, I can’t think of one offhand.” And then pivot, by saying, “But you know what isn’t a joke? The fact that so many health crises lead to bankruptcies.”

  It was a learning moment. Unlike the many previous potential learning moments from which I could have learned, but didn’t. So I sat down with Jess and did yet another practice session on pivoting. And this time, I was determined to get it right.

  A couple of days later I had a sit-down interview with a Minnesota print reporter who had interviewed me a number of times before. I have no recollection of the actual content of the interview, but I distinctly remember the thrill of using a new skill.

  Right out of the box, I pivoted to avoid answering a perfectly valid question so I could instead talk about whatever it was I was supposed to talk about that day. And the reporter seemed just fine with it!

  So I did it again on the second question. Again, the reporter seemed to have absolutely no problem. On the next question, just for the hell of it, I really overdid it, pivoting gratuitously. Again, I completely got away with it. The rest of the interview involved a string of egregious pivots followed by my hammering home some point or other.

  When the interview ended, the veteran reporter turned to Jess and Andy. “Hey, he’s getting a lot better!” he said with a smile. “I think he’s got a real shot!”

  Chapter 12

  No Joke

  Because I was in comedy for thirty-five years, it was (and sometimes remains) hard to get the national political press to focus on the substance of my message as a candidate. The day after I announced, newspapers nationwide featured some version of what our team would come to call the “No Joke” headline. Stuff like:

  NO JOKE: FRANKEN ANNOUNCES SENATE BID

  NO JOKE: FRANKEN RUNNING FOR SENATE

  FRANKEN ANNOUNCES RUN FOR SENATE: NO JOKE

  And so on. I imagine that the writers of all these headlines were very pleased with themselves. And to be fair, sometimes you shouldn’t overlook the ob
vious. But it just never stopped.

  NO JOKE: FRANKEN WINS DFL NOMINATION

  NO JOKE: FRANKEN WINS RECOUNT

  FRANKEN TAKES OATH OF OFFICE

  Mondale and Klobuchar Escort New Senator to Well of Senate for Oath—No Joke

  NO JOKE: FRANKEN PASSES BILL TO FUND VACCINE FOR ZIKA VIRUS

  They’re a dog with a bone. They can’t help it. And they’ll never stop. I know when I shuffle off this mortal coil, some future media outlet will run an item entitled:

  NO JOKE: FORMER THREE-TERM SENATOR DEAD AT 93

  Hell, let’s make that “Dead at 106.” Seriously.

  Chapter 13

  Harry and Chuck

  My growth as a candidate notwithstanding, I had a big political problem on my hands in those early days. I was running more or less against the wishes of the D.C. Democratic establishment, personified by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).

  The DSCC can make or break a Democratic Senate candidate’s campaign. They make a judgment about whether you’re a good candidate, whether you’re running a smart campaign—basically, whether you have a shot at winning. And that judgment matters, because even though they won’t generally put out a press release declaring you a loser, they make their opinion known to influential politicos.

  So if the DSCC doesn’t like you, analysts might reflect their pessimism in the horse-race-obsessed coverage that dominates the news. You might have a hard time getting your calls returned by major donors, who may have heard that your race might not be a great investment. You might even have trouble getting senior staff to sign on, because the world of Democratic operatives is small and nobody wants to spend months on a campaign only to lose.

  And then, of course, when the general election heats up and it’s time for the DSCC to start running ads and investing in field operations, they spend their money strategically. The last thing you want is to find yourself being pummeled with negative ads in October and have the DSCC shrug its shoulders because they think they’d be throwing their money away.

  Obviously, the DSCC doesn’t want to throw away a seat, either. So they don’t usually settle for just being disappointed in the candidate they end up with. Instead, they tend to intervene below the radar to make sure they get a candidate they like. And if you’re not a candidate they’ve specifically recruited to run, trying to earn their support can feel a lot like a hostile job interview.

  First, I met with Harry Reid. I had never met the soft-spoken majority leader before, and didn’t quite know what to expect.

  The first thing Harry asked me was, “How do you make a living?” The question didn’t completely surprise me. A lot of people don’t know that the comedy they see on television is actually written, especially on a talk show or even a sketch comedy show like SNL. So I explained my career as quickly as possible.

  It occurred to me a few years later that Harry might have been pulling my leg. So I asked him if he had been joking. Harry said, “No. It’s a good first question. Some guys have no way to make money while they’re running and do funny things with campaign funds.”

  He meant “funny—illegal,” not “funny—haha.”

  Anyway, after I had explained the comedy business to Harry, he passed me off to Chuck.

  I had known Chuck Schumer since college, where he had seen me in a one-act play in which I’d played a character named Bernard, who became transformed whenever he called himself “Spike.” Since I lived in New York for quite some time and traveled in Democratic circles all my adult life, I’d run into Chuck many times over the previous three and a half decades, and he’d always started each interaction by calling me “Spike” to remind me that he remembered the play. I found this slightly irritating, but also kind of adorable.

  The day I went to see him in the Senate, he greeted me with a grin and a hearty “Spike!” And then things took a turn.

  Chuck was very candid, telling me he and the DSCC were not excited about the idea of my running.

  “We should have a 60 percent chance of winning this seat,” he explained. “You have about a 40 percent chance.”

  I made my case: I told him about all the groundwork we had laid, the size and enthusiasm of our rallies, all the money coming in.

  But Chuck was looking for someone else, and even asked my opinion of a couple of state legislators he was thinking of recruiting. Both were friends of mine, which I explained to Chuck, not sure what else to say.

  Chuck nodded, and apologized for being so frank. I told him I appreciated his honesty. Which was absolutely true. At least I knew where he stood.

  And Chuck never called me “Spike” after that.

  While I would need help from the Democratic establishment to win in November, I had my own plan for becoming the DFL nominee. With or without Harry and Chuck on board, it was full speed ahead.

  Minnesota’s primary was scheduled for September 2008, but traditionally the nomination is won when a candidate is endorsed at the DFL state convention, which was scheduled for June 2008 in Rochester.

  The endorsement process was set to begin on February 5, 2008, at local precinct caucuses, where DFLers would meet in their neighborhoods and choose delegates to move on to their senate district or county conventions. At those regional conventions, delegates to the state convention would be elected. And in Rochester, those state convention delegates would join superdelegates (mostly state legislators and party officials) in voting on which candidate to endorse. If you got 60 percent of the state convention delegates, you got the party’s endorsement—effectively becoming the nominee.

  Because I announced so early—February 14, 2007—we had nearly a full year before caucus night to get ready. What was our plan? Simple: Do everything we could to appeal to the people who were likely to show up on caucus night and participate in the complicated multistep delegate selection process—the bean feed regulars I’d been getting to know since returning to the state. Meanwhile, develop relationships with superdelegates, and compete for the support of unions, environmental organizations, progressive advocacy groups, and other groups whose endorsement carried a lot of weight for party members who were likely to be politically active.

  Now, if all this seems a little dry to you, imagine instead the training montage from a Rocky movie, with a driving soundtrack and energetic editing. But instead of jumping rope, I’m eating hotdish at an assisted living facility that traditionally has high caucus turnout. Instead of guzzling a dozen raw eggs, I’m being driven five hours to speak for five minutes at the Otter Tail County convention. Instead of hitting a speed bag, I’m playing phone tag with a state representative who’s on the fence.

  The grizzled veteran in charge of our field and outreach operation (my Burgess Meredith, if you will) was twenty-five-year-old James Haggar. James had worked on Paul Wellstone’s last race in 2002, and like many young (and not-so-young) people who had poured their hearts and souls into that tragic campaign, he was initially hesitant about joining mine.

  I mentioned earlier that Paul’s life, and the tragic circumstances of his death, and the ugly political aftermath, made every step in my political journey feel a little heavier. And I was just Paul’s friend. The entire Minnesota DFL community was full of people who had been at headquarters that October day when the call came in, who had worked side by side with Mary McEvoy and Tom Lapic and Will McLaughlin (the staffers who had died in the crash), whose entire political consciousness had been shaped by the work they did for and with Paul and Sheila Wellstone. And for them it’s impossible to overstate just how much Paul’s memory hung over the 2008 campaign.

  So when you tried to hire those people, you weren’t just asking them to help you. You were asking them to trust you—to live up to Paul’s legacy, and to carry on his work, and, frankly, to avenge him a little bit. And that’s a lot of trust to ask for. Especially if you are the kind of candidate who is prone to, say, yelling at a prominent political r
eporter about the use of the word “motherfuckers.”

  It took a few weeks to convince James to come aboard. But when he did, he worked like a guy who had a lot more at stake than just his win-loss record. He put in eighteen-or twenty-hour days, seven days a week, plowing through the pile of cheap candy that was always on his desk and staring up at a whiteboard that listed which way all the key players in the state were leaning—key players like Tom Rukavina, the hilarious, irascible curmudgeon who represented a big slice of the Iron Range in the state legislature.

  (A story about Tom: He was once in a parade and a guy he knew called out, “Hey, Tommy! Why do you only care about the poor?” Without missing a beat, Rukavina responded, “You are poor, dummy.”)

  I may have been focused on the kind of patient grassroots organizing and relationship building I would need to win the DFL endorsement, but I wasn’t ignorant of the extremely valid concerns that Chuck had raised about my chances in a general election.

  Early on, we hired a pollster, Diane Feldman, another Wellstone veteran whose job it was to help me figure out the right way to talk to the broader audience of Minnesotans about who I was and what I wanted to do as their senator.

  We also needed another media consultant, since Mandy was still tied up with Hillary, who was still battling Obama for the presidential nomination. After a few meetings, we hired Saul Shorr, a garrulous bulldog of an adman from Philadelphia who was almost more excited than I was about going after Norm Coleman.

  With the team in place, it was time to get some data. The first internal polls we took roughly matched the public polling at the time: I was down by double digits against Coleman.