Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  “Your gun?” my mother-in-law asked.

  “Yes! My gun! I can’t find my gun!” I was frantic. Finding my gun was supposed to take seconds. Now my campaign was one question away from crashing and burning and I was going to be late for my first event!

  I flew past Fran out into the hallway, down the stairs, and out the door.

  Moments later my distraught mother-in-law came downstairs and found Franni in the kitchen. “Has it gotten that bad?!” she cried. “Has it gotten so bad that Al has to carry a gun?!”

  By this point, Barack Obama had opened up a significant lead over John McCain, and Democratic Senate candidates around the country were on the rise as well. My race seemed to be one of the few where things were getting hairier and hairier. So a lot of national Democrats volunteered to come to Minnesota to help out by holding big rallies.

  Big rallies look great on TV, of course, and guarantee you coverage in the newspaper, which is great. But they’re also opportunities to build your get-out-the-vote program. You station volunteers with clipboards all around the room and urge people to sign pledge cards committing to vote. Then, in the days leading up to the election, you follow up and make sure people follow through.

  The Clintons were champs. Hillary came to Minneapolis on October 21 for a huge afternoon rally at the University of Minnesota. Then Bill for another at the Minneapolis Convention Center on October 30, the Thursday before the election. That weekend, with our numbers on the Iron Range looking shaky, we called Hillary and asked her to come back. She saw how close the race looked and agreed to come to Duluth for another rally to help get me over the top.

  But one person who had no interest in providing that help was Barack Obama.

  I believe President Obama has been a hero—one of the best leaders this country has ever had, a man of incredible grace and bountiful intelligence who made real progress for America and deserves to go down in history as one of our very best presidents.

  But Candidate Obama, or at least the Obama campaign, was extremely unhelpful. After our Minneapolis rally, Hillary was heading up to the Range for a rally for Obama in Hibbing. Amy and I joined her on the flight. Only the Obama campaign wouldn’t allow me on the stage, so Hillary and Amy and Congressman Jim Oberstar would just point to me and say nice things about me, and I’d stand up in the crowd and wave. Awkward.

  Over and over again, we asked the Obama campaign to come to Minnesota to hold a big rally, or to hold a small rally, or to land his damn plane at the airport even one time so the newspaper could have a picture of me standing next to the incredibly popular president-in-waiting. No dice. When on October 31 he landed in Des Moines, just a short hop from Rochester, Minnesota, it almost seemed like he was going out of his way to avoid me.

  On October 28, a week before the election, our tracking poll found me up by five: Franken 41, Coleman 36, Barkley 19. The next day, October 29, it was a three-point lead: Franken 40, Coleman 37, Barkley 18.

  That day, a weird thing happened. Norm was leaving a campaign event in St. Cloud when, out of nowhere, two men jumped out of the bushes and started chasing him to his car. Does that sound like the kind of Jason Bourne–style action this narrative has been in desperate need of all along? Well, sorry. They weren’t secret agents sent to retrieve a microchip. They were reporters—from the Star Tribune. In fact, they were investigative reporters, guys like the team in Spotlight who dig into big scandals. And, boy, did they have a doozy of a scandal to ask Norm about.

  Their story ran the next day, Thursday, October 30. It explained that, earlier that week, a lawsuit had been filed in Texas by Paul McKim, the former CEO of an oil and gas services company called Deep Marine Technology (DMT), alleging that the controlling shareholder of DMT had improperly diverted company resources.

  That controlling shareholder? Nasser Kazeminy—yep, the guy who had flown Norm around the world on vacation and also bought him suits. And that improper diversion of company resources? A payoff to Norm Coleman.

  The lawsuit alleged that Kazeminy had funneled money to Coleman through a Minneapolis insurance firm where Coleman’s wife, Laurie, worked in a (no-show) job as an insurance consultant (despite the fact that she had no experience in the field of insurance). McKim said that the chief financial officer of DMT had relayed a conversation in which Kazeminy explained that “U.S. Senators don’t make shit” and detailed a plan to send the Colemans $25,000 a month. In fact, according to the lawsuit, three of these $25,000 payments went through before McKim could stop the scheme.

  Someone had delivered a copy of the lawsuit to the Star Tribune in an anonymous envelope. And now its two ace investigative reporters were waving copies of it at Norm Coleman, who dove into his SUV. The reporters continued to demand answers, pounding on the windows until the car peeled out. The DSCC tracker’s video was striking, and so was Coleman’s response—he canceled all his events that afternoon.

  “Huh,” I thought upon hearing about all this. “That doesn’t sound totally unlike Norm. Probably good for me, right?” But of course, I had no idea whether any of it was true. And I resolved to just keep focused on my own message.

  Eventually, Norm emerged to deny the allegations, which came as no surprise. What did come as a surprise to me, although I guess it shouldn’t have, was that he accused me of being behind the lawsuit in the first place.

  “Huh,” I thought upon hearing that. “That’s insane.” I’d never heard of the lawsuit, or of Paul McKim, or of Deep Marine Technology. And how exactly had I convinced the Republican CEO of a Texas company to file a huge lawsuit? It seemed like a kind of desperate accusation.

  “Oh well,” I thought. “People won’t buy that.”

  Our tracking poll on Thursday the thirtieth showed me up by two; our tracking poll on Friday the thirty-first showed me up by one.

  The final weekend of a campaign is usually all about getting out the vote. Your final TV ads are locked in. Your final rallies are set. It’s just a straight-ahead sprint to the finish line.

  But not for us.

  On Saturday, November 1, Norm did something that even I couldn’t believe. He put up a hastily shot last-minute ad featuring him and Laurie sitting side by side on their couch. “Al Franken’s eleventh-hour attack,” Norm begins sadly. “Phony accusations filled with lies delivered anonymously to a Minnesota newspaper before being filed in a Texas court. A vicious personal attack on my wife. This time Al Franken’s crossed the line.”

  It was Hall-of-Fame-level chutzpah. “A vicious personal attack on my wife.” We still had no idea whether anything in the lawsuit was true—but it certainly wasn’t a “personal attack,” at least not from me, and it wasn’t on Laurie. It was a very serious allegation that Norm had accepted bribes—which, again, hadn’t come from me.

  Looking back at it now, I guess I can see how he might have felt like that was his only move. But at the time, I just couldn’t believe the gall. The whole thing felt like a new level of ugly. This wasn’t what I’d signed up for.

  We quickly put together a response of our own in which I flat-out accused Norm of lying. But stations told us it was too late to “change traffic”—to replace the issue-focused ads we’d been planning with this new response. Schriock bullied them into doing it anyway.

  Schriock was doing a lot of bullying that week. As materials arrived at DFL headquarters for the weekend’s big get-out-the-vote push, we got a look at the doorhangers that canvassers would leave for voters to discover on election day. Funded and approved by the Obama campaign in Chicago, they featured big pictures of Barack Obama and encouragements to vote for various down-ballot offices on the DFL ticket—but barely any mention of the Senate race. Obama had decided to basically pretend that I wasn’t even on the ballot.

  Fortunately, the guy running the Obama campaign’s Minnesota efforts was Jeff Blodgett. Schriock pleaded with him: If our campaign paid to redo the doorhangers, only this time with me included prominently on them, would Jeff go rogue and use them instead of the o
nes he’d gotten from Chicago? Jeff agreed. The Franken-free doorhangers vanished.

  Then, on Sunday night, November 2, two days out, we met for our final debate at the Fitzgerald Theater. I got off one good line—“This is not about Norm Coleman’s wife. This is about Senator Coleman’s political sugar daddy!”—but otherwise tried to keep the focus on the issues. Everyone was on edge. Everyone was exhausted.

  Afterward, Schriock and Cullen Sheehan, Norm’s campaign manager, found themselves together by the stage as the room emptied. “What’s going to happen?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  “Me, either,” said Cullen.

  The next day—Monday, November 3—we ran the very last round of our tracking poll:

  Coleman 41, Franken 39, Barkley 14.

  Chapter 21

  “It’s Close, It’s Very Close”

  If you’ve ever watched a TV show or a movie about an election, you know what election day looks like: forests of candidate signs outside polling places, TV news trucks doing live spots, “I Voted!” stickers on everyone’s lapels.

  But until you’ve been a candidate, or worked on a campaign, or been a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2016, it’s hard to understand the peculiar kind of anxiety that takes hold as the day turns to evening. You spend two years working yourself to exhaustion, trying to do everything right, and then, at a certain point on a fall Tuesday, it’s suddenly no longer in your hands. You still carry all the emotional weight of the campaign. But there’s really nothing left for you to do except pester everyone around you with the same question: “What are you hearing?”

  One person who was asking that question was Chuck Schumer. He had called Schriock that morning and said he knew what was going to happen in every Senate race in the country except ours. “So, what’s going to happen there?” he had asked her.

  “It’s close,” Schriock had told him. “It’s very close.”

  A friend of mine, who worked with one of the networks, heard in the late afternoon that exit polls from Minnesota were looking good for me. Very good, in fact. Like, really good. Of course, this was the same guy who four years earlier had called to tell me that the exit polls looked very good for Kerry.* So as the Frankens arrived at election night headquarters at the Crowne Plaza hotel in St. Paul, silently riding the elevator up to our suite, my optimism was tempered with an equal dose of pessimism. Very fitting for what lay ahead.

  As the polls began closing in the East, with states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia going for Barack Obama, it was quickly becoming clear that this would be an especially bad night for racists all across the country.†

  The networks quickly started calling races, and Democrats were picking up one Senate seat after another. At 8 p.m., the polls closed in Minnesota, and returns began to trickle in.

  “How does it look?” I asked Schriock.

  “It’s early,” she answered. “But it looks close.”

  Precincts and counties continued to come in. “How we doin’?” I asked Schriock.

  “It looks like it’s going to be close.”

  As we scrutinized the Minnesota returns, Democrats continued to gain Senate seats and Barack Obama continued his sweep to victory.

  “What’s it look like?” I’d ask Schriock.

  “It’s going to be very close.”

  The networks agreed with Schriock. “A very close race in Minnesota,” they’d say, “between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and former Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken.”

  This was beginning to become unpleasant. No joke.

  Then, at 10 p.m. central time, as soon as the polls closed on the West Coast, the networks called the presidential race for Barack Obama.

  It was a stunning moment. The networks cut to a quarter million people in Grant Park in Chicago going absolutely nuts. We could not take our eyes off the TV. That mass of people—all ages, all races—cheering, jumping for joy, waving sparklers, grinning, laughing, crying. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry myself. My God! He won! Obama won!

  And then he and his family took the stage. Pandemonium. We had a young, smart, cool, handsome president-elect! And he had a young, smart, cool, beautiful family! And they were black! Holy crap!

  I felt lifted. Elated almost. But not quite. “Why?” I asked myself. “Why am I not euphoric?”

  Oh. Right.

  I was having a rugged night emotionally. I’d say the same was true for pretty much everyone on our team. But Schriock and Dan Cramer, the Wellstone alum who was running our field program, were all business, analyzing the returns precinct by precinct.

  “How’s it looking?” I asked Schriock.

  “It’s going to be very close,” she said.

  I tried Dan, hoping for a better answer.

  “Very close,” he said.

  At least Franni was confident. To this day, she will say, “I just knew you were going to win.” And to this day, I will contend that there was absolutely no reason for her to feel that way.

  By midnight, it was getting clearer than ever that the outcome would be, in Schriock’s words, “very, very close.”

  When Franni and I went to bed around three in the morning, we were behind by about fifteen hundred votes. There were still votes out from St. Louis County, which included Duluth and the Iron Range, so there was reason to hope that I’d wake up refreshed three hours later with a lead. There were also votes outstanding in the exurbs of Minneapolis, so there was reason to worry that I’d wake up refreshed three hours later a loser.

  When I did wake up three hours later, thoroughly unrefreshed, I was still behind. But the margin had narrowed slightly. It was now very, very, very close. About eleven hundred votes. Or about four one-hundredths of a percent.

  At 6:30 in the morning, with nine of the state’s more than four thousand precincts still left to report, the AP called the race for Coleman. But we knew the race was going to overtime regardless. Under state law in Minnesota, a recount is automatically triggered if an election is within one-half of a percent.

  Schriock asked me and Franni if we were willing to go through a recount. We looked at each other and said, “Yeah!”

  At 10:30 a.m., with the remaining nine precincts counted, and Coleman’s margin now 725 votes, Norm held a press conference and declared himself the winner. When asked what he would do if he were in my place, Coleman was very clear. “I would step back. I just think the need for the healing process is so important. The possibility of any change of this magnitude in the voting system we have is so remote.”

  So, in the interest of “healing,” Norm had decided that were he behind, he would step back. It wouldn’t be long before Norm would reverse himself and take the “anti-healing” position.

  Chapter 22

  The Recount

  In August 2012, I went out to Washington state to do a fund-raiser for my colleague Senator Maria Cantwell. After the event, the two of us sat together on some rich person’s porch and talked about senator stuff.

  Maria was reflecting back on her first race for the Senate in 2000, which she had won after a painful two-week recount. Let me repeat that: a painful two-week recount.

  As she described her two-week ordeal, I could see the anguish clearly written on Maria’s face. Then she turned to me and asked, “How long was your recount?”

  “Eight months.”

  “Oh my God. How did you do that?”

  “Well,” I said, putting things in perspective, “it wasn’t the Bataan Death March.”

  Technically, it wasn’t an eight-month recount. The recount itself actually ended on January 5, in time for me to be seated with the rest of my class on January 6. So it was a two-month recount. Worse than Maria’s, but still.

  On January 6, however, Norm Coleman officially took the anti-healing position, filing what is known as an election contest. In other words, he went to court to try to overturn my victory.

  That thing, the election contest? That took a w
hile. The contest wouldn’t be decided until April 13. And then Norm, doubling down on the anti-healing thing, appealed that ruling to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which ate up another two and a half months.

  But, you know. No hard feelings.

  Minnesota is widely and rightly lauded for its civic spirit, which is reflected not just in the high-minded tone of its political discourse (until Norm and I ruined that forever) and its high level of voter turnout (in 2008, as in the previous six federal elections, Minnesota led the nation), but also in its election laws.

  Our election officials are transparent and accountable. Our procedures are careful and methodical. We take our time to get it right.

  For example: Even before a recount, there’s a process called a canvass.

  You know the vote totals that you see next to candidates’ names on election night? Yeah. Those are always wrong.

  Why? Well, because human beings are fallible. And the people who count votes are human beings.

  In Minnesota, the election night count is tabulated by the secretary of state’s office based on results they get from precincts across the state, either by computer or by phone. And in that process, little mistakes happen: arithmetic errors, transposed numbers, sevens that look like ones. An election official will say “nine hundred and sixteen” and the person on the other end of the phone will hear “nine hundred and sixty.” Stuff like that.

  So the election night count is always off. Sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot. And that’s why election officials always do a canvass: a process by which they go back through the precinct-by-precinct data, check their math, and reconcile all the numbers to make sure they’ve fixed any errors.

  This happens after every election, and it can change the margin by tens of votes, hundreds of votes, or thousands of votes. And the reason you almost never hear about it is that even a shift of thousands of votes almost never matters.