Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  Republicans, however, had something else up their sleeve. They pointed to news reports about speeches I had given in California and suggested that since I hadn’t been paying the franchise fee, perhaps I’d dodged paying taxes on the income I’d earned there as well.

  Franni and I knew that was ridiculous—we pay our taxes every year. But we realized that we had paid taxes on the income from those speeches to the state we were living in (until 2006, New York), and not to the states where I had done the speeches.

  In other words, the good news was that I hadn’t committed the unpardonable sin of evading taxes. The bad news was that I had committed the relatively understandable but harder-to-explain mistake of paying those taxes to the wrong place.

  And the worst news was that we were on defense yet again—it took us a long, horrible weekend to reconstruct years of back taxes. We sent $70,000 in checks to seventeen very confused states that didn’t generally get sent money they hadn’t asked for (and requested corresponding refunds from New York, where we had overpaid our taxes by almost exactly the same amount). And I spent an entire day explaining what had happened in a series of agonizing interviews.

  It was not my favorite day of the campaign. But it felt good to be able to lay it all out there. And after a week of brutal press, the stories were less awful than we’d feared. It was an honest mistake, and when we learned about it, we fixed it. People could understand that.

  Especially people who were suddenly realizing they’d made the same mistake themselves. For example, presented with an opportunity to beat up on me on the Fox News morning show Fox and Friends, Newt Gingrich gave me a pass. Watching it, I realized, “I bet Newt doesn’t pay taxes to the right states for his speeches, either!”

  We lived to fight another day. And I was proud of how I’d handled the crisis. I’d always known that sometimes people are judged more by how they deal with a mistake than by the mistake itself. At the beginning of the campaign, I’d even considered deliberately making a mistake so I could be seen as handling it well. And as it turned out, I didn’t need to!

  Still, Coleman was now up by seven points in the polls, and as we’d gotten sidetracked by workers’ comp and taxes, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, the peace candidate, had begun to gain some traction in an endorsement race that most people assumed was over.

  But we felt like we were okay—in large part because we finally managed to land a campaign manager.

  I’d known Stephanie Schriock for a few years, since she was the finance director for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, where she had revolutionized grassroots small-dollar fund-raising.

  I had actually tried to hire her to do the same job for Midwest Values PAC back in 2005. She’d passed, choosing instead to manage Jon Tester’s successful 2006 Senate campaign in her home state of Montana.

  But she and I had really hit it off, and we knew she had ties to Minnesota (her grandmother lived here and she’d gone to college in Mankato). As we’d gained momentum in the early spring, Chuck Schumer had grown more willing to help us out. And as we’d lost momentum in the late spring, he realized that the best way to help us out was to convince Stephanie to come back to Minnesota to manage my race.

  She finally agreed to come on board, promising that she’d arrive in Minnesota the week before the June 7 convention. And despite everything, we still felt like things were more or less on track, with the endorsement still mine to lose and Coleman within reach.

  And then.

  Chapter 16

  Public Opprobrium

  The January 2000 issue of Playboy magazine was its Millennial Issue, and they had asked important writers like William F. Buckley, father of American conservatism, and prolific science-fiction author Isaac Asimov to pen thoughtful articles pegged to the turning of the millennium.

  They also asked me to write something funny.

  Since it was Playboy, I thought I’d write a parody of a Playboy article—specifically, the kind of feature they always used to have about some hip new technology that every hip guy should be hip to. You know, hi-fis, Jet Skis, or, in this case, since we were talking about the future, virtual sex. Funny idea, right?

  So I wrote about my visit to a citadel of higher learning, the Minnesota Institute of Titology. As you may have guessed from its name, the institute was fictitious,* as were all of the activities depicted in the piece, which devolved into a lengthy and vivid description of my participation in various “virtual sex” acts. I had given the piece the unfortunate title of “Porn-O-Rama,” proving that, as of late 1999, I hadn’t been planning a run for political office.

  CUT TO: May 19, 2008, three weeks before the DFL convention. Republicans were trying to make hay over a fund-raiser I’d held in Chicago with Christie Hefner, the progressive activist and daughter of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. And to call further attention to my unsavory association with the Hefner dynasty, Michael Brodkorb published the text of “Porn-O-Rama” on “Minnesota Democrats Exposed.”*

  Once again, it came as a surprise to our team. Although this time it was because the research firm we’d hired had only looked for articles listed as being written by “Al Franken,” and this one was listed in the Nexis database under the byline “Franken, Al.”†

  A stricken Jess McIntosh walked into my office, where Kris Dahl was cracking the whip on another endless call time session. “Al, do you remember writing an article for Playboy where you talked about having sex with robots?”

  “Oh, yeah. It was kinda funny! Have you read it?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “Uh-huh. Did you think it was funny?”

  Jess turned to Kris. “Can we have the room?”

  Republicans, as you might expect, did their best to turn “Porn-O-Rama” into a big story. A group of GOP women legislators wrote an open letter attacking me for “demeaning and degrading women.”‡

  Meanwhile, we got a stern email from an “Eric White” of a company called VR Innovations.

  SUBJ: Trademark Use

  Please advise Al, the term “Virtual Sex Machine” is a trademark of VR Innovations/Eric J. White, and was in 2000 when he wrote the article for Playboy (reference USPTO.Gov). We chose not to pursue the matter then, but will not tolerate confusion with our trademark today as some sort of “political attention getter.”

  If he chooses to use that term in his upcoming speeches, please be sure it is in reference to our products and services.

  Thank you.

  But a trademark infringement lawsuit was the least of my concerns.

  As Hurricane Porn-O-Rama gained momentum, I began to feel slightly beleaguered and a little sorry for myself. So I emailed my friend Al Gore asking for a little advice:

  I would love to discuss with you sometime personal coping mechanisms for being a politician who is being unfairly attacked. I’m doing well, but I’m finding there are aspects of running for office that are unpleasant.

  Gore wrote back:

  Suck it up.

  “Suck it up” became a mantra of sorts. I wrote it on a sheet of paper and tacked it up to the wall in my office at headquarters, where I would spend hours calling delegates and other politicos, trying to explain myself, asking them not to bail on me.

  Truly, there would be much for me to suck up in the days that followed.

  Hurricane Porn-O-Rama made landfall on May 29, nine days before the convention, when Representative Betty McCollum, a DFLer who represents St. Paul, finally broke the dam by telling the Associated Press that my “pornographic writings” were “indefensible.”

  Republicans attacking me for something I’d written was one thing. A prominent DFLer doing it made the story exponentially more damaging.

  That afternoon, Politico reported that all five members of the DFL congressional delegation had met to share their concerns about what my baggage might mean for their chances down the ballot. Even Tim Walz, the freshman congressman for whom I had campaigned tirelessly in 2006 and who was one of my best friends in Minnesota polit
ics, couldn’t help but speak up, telling the AP that the piece was “pretty inappropriate” and suggesting that he might not want to share a ticket with me:

  I’m concerned that from the top of the party all the way on down, people make a simple assumption that there are commonalities if we’re all in the same party. I don’t want to get associations made that I can’t control.

  This was officially a crisis. I felt terrible. On the one hand, I felt like if I could just sit down with everyone who read, “Franken writes sex article for Playboy,” I could rescue the piece from the gears of the DeHumorizer™ and explain why I’d written it. On the other hand, it seemed like people didn’t really care whether there was a good explanation. There was no ReHumorizing this one. Even in context, the fact that I had written it at all freaked some people out.

  Still, when I talked to Chuck Schumer the next day and he suggested that I consider apologizing for writing the piece, I balked. What would I even be apologizing for? For writing a silly humor piece? That was my job for thirty-five years! It felt wrong—no, worse, it felt like a betrayal of myself—to renounce one particular piece just because people felt it crossed the line. Once you even acknowledge that there is a line, that there are things you shouldn’t be allowed to joke about, that there are words that can’t be said no matter the context, you’re selling out the very idea of comedy.

  Stephanie Schriock’s first day in the office was June 2, and she walked into a building on fire. Frankly, we were relieved she showed up at all. When the Playboy article surfaced, Stephanie had been in Washington. She’d read it and taken it to Jim Messina, a Montana buddy of hers and the man who would manage President Obama’s 2012 campaign. “Is this a campaign killer?” she asked him.

  Messina scanned it. “No,” he said. “He can survive this.” But Schriock noticed he was blushing.

  And then that day, Republicans had held another press conference to denounce a whole new list of old jokes that fit under the umbrella of “offensive to women.”

  Twenty-two-year-old Natalie Volin had the unenviable job of managing our outreach to a progressive feminist community that was deeply divided about all this. When she would tell me that I needed to call one of her people right away, I’d jump to do it. Though sometimes she would decide that the call should come from someone, anyone, other than me.

  Natalie did heroic work building and maintaining and in some cases rehabilitating those relationships. But if I was going to get past this, I myself was going to have to find a way to address and allay people’s fears and concerns, whether they were judgmental (“Anyone who writes something like that has no business being a senator”) or strategic (“Republicans are going to eat him alive”).

  Because with the convention just days away, our numbers were beginning to drop. James’s nightly reports on delegate calls grew less confident and more troubling. And some of the superdelegates who had been on his whiteboard for months as supporters were starting to waver.

  On Tuesday, June 3—four days out—a field organizer from the 8th Congressional District (Duluth and the Iron Range) reported in with an S.O.S.:

  Subject: HELP

  Bleeding dels*… the top loser is Mary B 9 percent last night in the first.† I am losing them in the 8th I think my strongs‡ are below 50 percent now… the 7th Congressional§ is the same. The phones are saturated, they aren’t answering its impossible to connect with these people… emails most are older Women who don’t use email… its 3 days out we cannot mail them something… If you get them you spend first ten minutes getting chewed out for harassing them too much.

  WE NEED to reach them…

  Al and his ‘child porn’¶ stuff is killing me!

  This is bigger than Tax Issue, I don’t want to seem sensational—sorry.

  What could I do? What could I say to these folks that would restore their rapidly dwindling faith in me? The team and I were spending hours on the phone calling delegates, James divvying up the names and numbers based on his calculation of what they needed to hear and who they needed to hear it from.

  And as we all—me, Franni, Thomasin, the staff, everyone—hit the phones that night, more and more Strong Frankens were turning to Lean Frankens, more and more Lean Frankens were turning to Undecideds, and more and more Undecideds weren’t returning our calls.

  Forget about winning in November—it began to seem possible, very possible, that my campaign wouldn’t even survive the DFL convention.

  Then, improbably, things got worse.

  The next day—June 5, the Thursday before the Saturday convention—Republicans accused me of joking about rape.

  During the 1994–95 season of SNL, a New York magazine writer spent a week at the show. Lorne had given the writer full access to everything, and the resulting article, entitled “Comedy Isn’t Funny,” was kind of a hit piece on the show, and on Lorne himself. That happens. My “joke about rape” came during a 2 a.m. rewrite session, where we were working on an Andy Rooney piece that Norm MacDonald had written for himself.

  Norm’s take on Andy Rooney, the extremely popular long-standing humorist for 60 Minutes, was that his humor could be a little on the banal side. In his sketch, Norm played Rooney cleaning out his desk:

  Here’s a letter from California. Here’s one from Illinois. Here’s another one from California. Here’s one from Maryland. This one’s from California, too. Here’s another one from California. There must be a lot of people who live in California.

  All of us around the table were looking for a turn in the piece, and I suggested that we suddenly transform Rooney into a monster after he finds an empty bottle of sedatives in another drawer: “I give the pills to Lesley Stahl. Then, when Lesley’s passed out, I take her to the closet and rape her.”

  Understand that I was not intending for this extremely dark joke to be aired on American television. It was a joke “for the room” suggesting a direction for the turn. I was like a NASA engineer who designed a hydraulic pump for the Mars rover that provided the breakthrough that led to the final hydraulic pump on the Mars rover. We eventually settled on Rooney saying he had spiked Mike Wallace’s drink and photographed him nude in a variety of positions.

  There was a reason Republicans saved this one for last. It had the feel of a knockout blow. Joking about rape? What the hell?

  The thing of it was, I could answer that question. Here’s what the hell: SNL had developed a culture which prized—no, celebrated—dark humor. The best example I can think of took place at a party at Laraine Newman’s house in L.A. Billy Murray carried Gilda Radner around the room after her second series of chemotherapy, saying, “Say your goodbyes now, everyone—she’s a goner!” Gilda was laughing hysterically.

  That isn’t an excuse, necessarily, but it is an explanation. When I discussed the situation with Conan O’Brien, who had been an SNL writer with me from 1989 to 1990, he wondered how I could ever explain the culture of a comedy rewrite table at two in the morning. “If I was on the stand at a trial,” Conan said, “and the prosecutor asked me, ‘Mr. O’Brien, have you ever joked at a rewrite table about defiling Lincoln’s body immediately after he was shot?’ I’d have to throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

  I knew exactly how a person who wasn’t completely ignorant of the horror of sexual assault could end up saying something in a writers’ room that made it sound like he was. But I didn’t know how to explain it to Minnesotans. Frankly, I didn’t know if they’d even let me.

  So that was my day on Thursday, the day before delegates would start arriving in Rochester for Saturday morning’s convention. Late that afternoon, with the newspapers asking for what felt like a really important comment from me on the Lesley Stahl story, my staff and consultants were in crisis mode on a long and unpleasant email thread that, fortunately for my own sanity, did not include me. If you’ve ever wondered how campaigns make decisions in crisis situations, perhaps you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I don’t enjoy reading it.

  One of my consultan
ts* offered this pitch at 5:40 p.m.:

  I understand that some people have seen my satiric writings as representing my views about women in real life. That is not true. I respect women—I have been married for 32 years, and Franni and I are proud of our children, including our daughter Thomasin, who is a teacher. I respect women in the home and in the workplace.

  Jess piped up: Could we hit Norm at the end? She added “… and I will work to represent them in the U.S. Senate—something that Norm Coleman has been doing a very bad job of.”

  Another consultant: “The line about their kids sounds very odd.” She pitched:

  I understand that some people have seen my writings as representing my views in real life. They don’t. They are satire. Some of it not very funny. In real life, I’ve been married for 32 years, have two wonderful children, and respect women in the home and the workplace.

  Wait, replied Jess. What about the pivot to Norm?

  By now it was 7:20, and the DSCC’s guy on the email chain was concerned: “I don’t think the pivot is as important, but we could wordsmith this to death over the next hour. You gotta get something to the AP so they can move a rewrite.”

  Schriock chimed in: “This seems to have gotten weaker. And read it out loud and it sounds arrogant or at least defensive.”

  At 7:26, a new draft:

  I understand that some people have seen my writings as representing my views in real life. They don’t. In real life, I have been married for 32 years, and Franni and I are proud of our children. I respect women in the home and in the workplace and I will work to represent them in the U.S. Senate—something that Norm Coleman hasn’t been doing for the last six years.

  7:30. The DSCC: “Go.”

  7:31. Yet another consultant: “I suggest adding the kids’ names so that it is at least obvious one is a daughter.”