by Al Franken
When I got to the Senate, I was eager to do my part to carry on Paul’s legacy and, if possible, expand upon it. First step: pushing the Department of Health and Human Services to finalize the regulations prescribed by the Wellstone-Domenici Act. It was complex, painstaking work, and I was responsible for almost none of it—it was undertaken mostly by my health care legislative staff working with HHS. And it remains a work in progress: Wellstone-Domenici is now fully implemented, and the Affordable Care Act built on its success by requiring that all policies sold through the exchange cover behavioral health services, including addiction treatment—which has been a lifesaver for many during the ongoing opioid crisis. But we are still nowhere near where we need to be in making sure that people who need treatment for mental illness and addiction can always get it.
Then came the rash of mass shootings, and the rash of national conversations about mental health. Lots of people were declaring that we needed to “do something.” But nobody was really clear on what exactly we could or should do.
In frustration, I asked the president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness how to respond.
She gave me a one-word answer: “Schools.”
She arranged a roundtable at a school in the Mounds View school district. The school had adopted an approach to mental health that seemed to be working. All the adults in the school community, from the principal and the teachers to the bus driver and the lunch ladies, had been taught what it looks like when a kid is dealing with mental health problems. If they saw a kid who seemed to be struggling, they could ask a professional (a counselor, a psychologist, a social worker, or a therapist) to check in with the student and determine whether he or she had a serious mental health issue. That professional would connect the child with mental health services in the Mounds View community.
At the roundtable, three mothers raved about what a difference this program had made for their children and their families. One in particular, Katie Johnson, made a profound impact on me. Katie told me that she was the single mother of two: a nine-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. “My son,” she said, “was completely out of control. So my life was completely out of control. I was in total despair.”
One day Katie got a call from a woman who introduced herself as the “mental health advocate” for Katie’s son. “She’s become my best friend,” Katie told me.
Katie’s son was diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger’s. “They treated him, and he completely turned around. Now he’s doing well in school. And he’s taking tae kwon do.”*
Katie looked me straight in the eye with the confidence of someone who had gone through a horrific ordeal and found herself safely on the other side. After years of chaos and frustration, her son was finally on the right track, and her own life finally felt manageable. Pointing to her heart, she told me proudly, “I am now bulletproof.”
“Hmm,” I thought. “Let’s do this.”
There was a gun bill working its way through the Senate, so I added an amendment that would fund training for people who work in schools to identify warning signs of mental illness and help detect and treat issues as early as possible. My colleagues understood the wisdom of the idea right away, and my provision passed by a nearly unanimous vote. But as you may recall, the gun bill failed. Still, the idea stuck. Soon after, we got a hundred million dollars in new funding to improve mental health services in schools. And we’ve gotten more since.
This money has helped train a lot of adults in schools to intervene when a student is having trouble, and it’s helped schools to hire a lot more counselors and social workers to treat those students, and it’s helped a lot of kids. But not every kid. On an issue like mental health, there’s never a big, dramatic final victory. There’s never a signing ceremony where the president officially abolishes undiagnosed mental illness once and for all. Kids and adults struggle with mental illness every day, and too many of them never get the help they need.
And that’s just kind of how it works. Sometimes you work your whole life to do something simple and noble and it doesn’t happen until six years after your death. Sometimes it never happens at all. Sometimes you get ninety-four of your colleagues to vote for your amendment, but the bill itself fails on a cynical, partisan filibuster. Sometimes you see a BREAKING NEWS banner on the TV in your office and something awful has happened and you get the creeping sensation that the whole sad “national conversation” is about to begin again.
But sometimes you can make a little progress, and sometimes you get to see what that progress looks like.
A few days after we secured that first batch of funding, I went to Westwood Elementary School in Bloomington, Minnesota, for another roundtable. There was real excitement among the twenty-some people who had heard about the new funding for programs like the one that was working in their school. Westwood has a therapist in residence, so parents don’t have to take the better part of a day to pick their child up to ferry them to and from an appointment. A ten-year-old boy told me how much his therapist, a cheerful young woman in her early thirties, had helped him. When he sees her in the hall during recess, he said, he gives her a big high five. Talk about destigmatizing!
When you’re a senator and you go to these roundtables, it’s often just one person after another telling you incredibly sad or depressing or inspiring stories. Me being me, I have a ritual to sort of puncture the emotion so I can switch gears and get my head into the next event. And after this roundtable, my driver, Brett, and I walked out to the car, climbed in and buckled up, and, per our ritual, I nodded at Brett and said, “Fooled ’em again!”
But this time, I added, almost to myself: “I’m a good senator.”
Chapter 39
Cracks in My Soul
The Democratic Senator’s Serenity Prayer
God Grant Me the Serenity to Accept the Things I Cannot Legislate
The Courage to Legislate the Things I Can
The Wisdom to Know the Difference
And the Patience to Explain That Difference to My Donors
Probably the most enjoyable part of public service is the fund-raising. That’s because you get to spend endless hours on the phone talking with people from all walks of life—though mainly rich people, and, also, you mostly talk to their voicemail or assistants. Not only that, but when you do manage to get them on the phone, the people on the other end are super excited to talk to you, because they know exactly why you’re calling: to ask them for their “support.”
And if you’re not sitting in a small room with your call time manager, calling people for three or four hours at a stretch, you may very well be flying across the country to speak to your supporters at the sumptuous home of a wealthy donor who wisely chose not to go into public service.
Or, even better, you might be flying back across the country in the middle of the night. Flying in the middle of the night gives you plenty of time to examine the choices you’ve made in your life, or to sleep, but also to write thank-you notes to donors.
Okay, let’s back up. Unfortunately, unless you’re very rich or not interested in winning, you need to raise money if you’re going to run for office. You need the resources to put a team together, to rent office space, to buy phones and computers and printers and toner, to feed volunteers, to travel around your state, to make ads, and to put the ads on the air. So before I go any further, let me just thank everyone who has ever contributed to my campaigns. The vast majority of you are not wealthy and give five, ten, or twenty-five of your hard-earned dollars. In fact, more than 90 percent of the donations I’ve received are of fifty dollars or less. Without the generosity of people who don’t own sumptuous homes, I would not be in the position I am to fight for the things we believe in.
Despite my success with direct mail and online fund-raising from small donors, I have to raise a lot of money the old-fashioned way: by picking up the phone and calling rich people. And it takes a little trial and error to discover what works and what ge
ts you a restraining order.
My very first fund-raising call, in late 2005, was to a successful St. Paul lawyer, John Faricy. Though we had never met, John took my call because he was familiar with my work as a comedian, author, and radio host. I made my pitch for the PAC I had started, and John immediately agreed to give. How much was I looking for?
I peered down at the notes on my call sheet. “Well, I guess five thousand dollars.”
John said, “Okay.”
I paused and then asked, “Are you sure?” I remember this only because John told the story, to gales of laughter, at one of my fund-raising dinners in 2014.
Call time is just you and your call time manager, a young staffer who is printing out and handing you call sheets and reminding you about any special information you might need to remember. Maybe the person you’re calling missed your last event because they were at their mother’s funeral or at a child’s hockey game. Or maybe they particularly love your work on fighting climate change. Sometimes you dial the phone; other times your call time manager does. Sometimes you have to do all the talking; sometimes the person you’re calling talks. Sometimes they talk too much.
As you dial, you peruse the person’s giving history—every donation they’ve made over the past several election cycles, not just to you, but to everyone. That’s all public information, by the way.
Also on my call sheets are notes from A. J. Goodman, the former death row attorney who has been my national fund-raising director for the last eleven years. A.J. makes the best call sheets, which include reminders like: “Don’t call the home. The wife hates politics.” Or: “Call her cell. He’s a Republican.” Or: “They’re divorced. No more Sharon. No more Sharon money.”
Am I giving you a good sense of what call time is like? Did you tune out when I mentioned “giving history” and then perk up a bit when you saw “death row”? I don’t know how interesting this sounds. But call time is less interesting than that.
It’s not uncommon to have three straight hours of call time scheduled as part of your day. During my recount, I often did eight hours of call time in a day. It’s brutal. But I probably hate call time less than most elected officials do.
See, when I was in comedy, I used to edit, which involves sitting in an edit room for hours on end while a skilled craftsman makes the edits that you or your cowriter or the director requests. It means reviewing all the takes for pieces of the best performances and looking for different camera angles and “sizes” (close-up, two-shot, wide) to cut around weaker performance moments. This can be more or less interesting than it sounds, depending on what you’re editing and whether you’re the one calling the shots. But whatever the case, I would always make a conscious decision to enjoy myself. “You’re going to be in this room for five hours,” I would tell myself. “You might as well enjoy it.”
That’s my call time philosophy, too. Just as I try to make fund-raising emails fun for the people who read them, I try to make call time fun for myself and my call time manager. And for whomever I’m calling.
Let’s say I get the assistant of an attorney in Dallas. I’ll say, “Hi, this is Al Franken calling for Mr. Hudnut.”
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Hudnut is in a meeting.”
“All right. Well, I’m calling to invite him and Sandra to a fund-raiser for me in Dallas on October 11.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Mr. and Mrs. Hudnut will be out of the country on October 11.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “And will the Hudnuts’ checkbook be out of the country?”
That almost always gets a laugh, and, often, money!
Over the course of the many hours I have spent in call time during the last decade, I have composed as a sanity maintenance device a musical entitled Call Time: The Musical.*
The musical takes place in a call time room with me and my call time manager, a table, and a phone. The audience can hear the phone on the other end. While it’s ringing, I sing (to the tune of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”):
Please answer the phone, Howard Goldfein
You maxed to me last cycle
Oh, won’t you be home, Howard Goldfein
If there’s no answer, the audience hears the Goldfeins’ outgoing message—an adorable little girl saying, “The Goldfeins aren’t home now.”
And then I leave a charming message: “Elise, this is Al Franken. You have a very young-sounding voice. I guess Howard robbed the cradle. Listen, I’m going to be in Cleveland on Thursday, April 7, for a fund-raiser at the home of Danny and Marilyn Lasky in Shaker Heights, and I’d love for you both to come. You can call A. J. Goodman at 555-287-6543 for all the details. A.J.’s a she. A female person. She’s a woman.”
Then I hang up and sing Call Time’s signature tune: “I Left a Message.”
It’s the signature tune for two reasons. First, because it’s so catchy and upbeat, and second, because I sing it roughly seventy-five times over the course of the show, which lasts six hours, with no intermission unless I have to go to the bathroom. Also, it provides almost all of Call Time’s production value. Because while I sing “I Left a Message,” the chorus members (who include six ballerinas, four jugglers, some acrobats, and several chimpanzees riding tricycles) enter, do their stuff, and sing their parts.
AL:
I left a message
On the phone
I left a message
They were not home
CHORUS:
No no no
AL:
I left a message
Oh yes I did
I left a message
I do not kid
CHORUS:
He left a message
Oh yes he did
He left a message
He does not kid
Yay!!!
Then the orchestra plays them off to thunderous applause.
Seriously, without Call Time: The Musical, my call time manager and I would go crazy.
You might be wondering who this “call time manager” is and how he or she can stand to do this job. After all, he or she has to sit through all these calls, too, but never gets to talk to anyone but me. On the other hand, I am raising the funds that will be used to pay his or her salary. So there’s that.
But because there is a burnout rate, I’ve actually had several call time managers over the years. Each contributed in their own way to Call Time: The Musical. The Beltway sensation Brian Heenan made a key breakthrough when he started to lavish praise upon my performance with every call.
“That was a great message,” Brian would say with absolute sincerity after I left a voicemail. “If I were her, I’d go to the fund-raiser.”
Or when I’d hang up after a long call with a prospective donor, Brian would say, “On this end, from what I heard, that was a great conversation. I bet he maxes out.”
Andy Osborne, who replaced Brian when the original cast departed, developed a running bit based on my suggestion that Rain Man would be the ideal call time manager.
“Definitely call the house: 555-681-2372. Last time you called—January 27, 2009, you called the office. Definitely called the office: 555-724-0966. The assistant, Brenda Downey, said definitely call the house.”
Or…
“Definitely maxed out to you in 2008. Gary gave $2,400 on April 12, 2007, for the primary. Attended Larry David event. Definitely attended. Another $2,400 for general. Definitely June 21, 2008. Summer solstice. Mariella also gave the full $4,800, also at the Larry David event. She’s a big Larry David fan. Definitely loves Curb Your Enthusiasm. Would definitely sleep with Larry David.”
“She said that?”
“Yes. But I added ‘definitely.’ She just said, ‘I’d sleep with Larry David.’”
“Rain Man, she was joking.” No reaction from Rain Man.
Now, you’ll notice I referred to Larry David. This is more than just a casual name drop like my earlier mentions of call time manager Brian Heenan and Dallas super-lawyer Mr. Hudnut. One of the things Norm Coleman atta
cked me for during that first campaign was that I received a lot of campaign money from the Left Coast Hollywood Elite, who are poisoning our culture and contributing to the breakdown of the American family.
And, indeed, over the years I’ve gotten a lot of support from people in show business, especially people I worked with over my thirty-five years in the industry.
So, as Republican lines of attack went, this was among the least dishonest. But that didn’t make it any less silly.
For one thing, like many Republicans, Coleman was raising much of his money from Big Oil, and Big Pharma, and Big Insurance. So I was happy to admit that I was raising money from what I called Big Comedy. It’s hard to argue that Ben Stiller has been a worse influence on our country than ExxonMobil, even if you were very disappointed with Zoolander 2.
But the real difference was that I had actually worked in Big Comedy. These were people I had made movies and TV shows with. These were people who know me personally. These were my friends.
Norm Coleman, on the other hand, had never been a wildcatter in the oil fields. He had never developed a lifesaving drug in the research lab of a pharmaceutical company. He hadn’t spent his career before politics as an actuary in the insurance business.
I got money from Big Comedy because my friends wanted to support me. My opponent got money from Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Insurance because they wanted something from him.
This is why I, and many other people, have long called for public financing of elections. It’s not just that all this fund-raising is a huge pain and a distraction from the work our elected officials should be spending their time doing (reading briefing books [or just books], talking to experts, crafting legislation, and meeting with constituents). The role of big money in our politics gives special interests a bigger megaphone than people who can’t write big checks.