Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  “No,” said Drew.

  “Oh, c’mon!” said Franken. “It’s funny. And it makes a point.”

  When Drew took the chief of staff position, he told me he would have to leave after two years, because by then both his kids would be in college and he’d have to find a real job. I asked Casey Aden-Wansbury, who had already done her share of dehumorizing as my communications director, to step into the job. As it turned out, Casey became the most unforgiving DeHumorizer™ of them all.

  Casey actually does have a sense of humor, but she is also one of the most frighteningly competent people I’ve ever met. She kind of reminds me of the Jessica Chastain character from Zero Dark Thirty—the obsessed CIA agent leading the bin Laden hunt. Except if Casey had been in that job, we would have shot off his face months earlier.

  Casey cracked down on this funny thing I’d do whenever I arrived at the Hart Senate Office Building around 9 a.m. There’d be long lines of staff and visitors winding out the doors waiting to go through the metal detectors. Of course, we senators get to go straight through. So I’d worm my way through the line saying, “More important than you, more important than you…” This was exactly the kind of thing that brought laughter and joy to hundreds, maybe thousands. Until Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira took offense.

  Teixeira, I am sure, was there to lobby for some very worthy cause, for which I applaud him. But he tweeted, “Just walked through security at Hart Senate OB, @AlFranken let me know ‘He is more important than me.’” And that was the end of that fun thing that had brightened the mornings of so many.

  Casey and I had our most protracted argument over a joke in June 2015, right after the Supreme Court issued its 5–4 ruling that marriage is a fundamental right for same-sex couples. Justice Antonin Scalia issued an unhinged dissent describing the majority ruling as “a judicial Putsch.” I wanted our communications department to issue the following statement:

  Senator Al Franken of Minnesota today applauded the Supreme Court’s decision and described Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent as “very gay.”

  My staff said no. But they didn’t say I couldn’t put it in a book someday!

  When I first got to the Senate, we lived in mortal fear of Capitol Hill gossip columns, which, believe it or not, exist. There are reporters at esteemed publications who just hang out in the Capitol waiting to catch a congressman failing to wash his hands after he pees or something.

  You’re not safe anywhere. Once, during the height of the Tiger Woods cheating scandal (cheating on his wife, not cheating at golf), I was on the Senate subway and joked to Kris Dahl, “I’m thinking of introducing some kind of Tiger Woods stamp.” He chuckled. We have fun.

  Later that day, Jess stepped into my office. “I got a call from ‘Heard on the Hill,’” she said, “and they said you were talking about introducing a Tiger Woods stamp.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, did you say that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ugh,” she said, her shoulders slumping. “Then I just won’t return the call.” She turned to head back to her desk.

  “No,” I said, stopping Jess in her tracks. “Tell them I was citing it as an example of a bad idea.” Which she did. The “Heard on the Hill” story came out the next day:

  STILL FUNNY

  Sen. Al Franken hasn’t lost his touch. An HOH tipster overheard the former comedian practicing his deadpan routine to a staffer while riding the Senate subway late last week. The Minnesota Democrat mused that someone ought to introduce legislation to create a Tiger Woods postal stamp, our spy says.

  A Franken spokeswoman says her boss used the idea of a postal stamp honoring the scandal-plagued, affair-having golfer as an “example of a bad idea.”

  We think it’s a funny one.

  The student had become the master.

  Chapter 44

  I Get Reelected

  In my first campaign in 2008, I barely survived the year’s nastiest, hardest-fought, most eventful and exhausting Senate race, winning by the smallest margin in American history after an unprecedented eight-month recount and legal battle.

  In my second campaign in 2014, I ran against a friendly, very successful businessman who didn’t know a lot about public policy, and I beat him by ten points.

  It was a terrible year for Democrats, which everybody saw coming. For one thing, it was a midterm, and, for whatever reason, we struggle to turn out voters in nonpresidential election cycles. Meanwhile, the group of senators up for reelection included a lot of the red-and purple-state Democrats who had been swept into office thanks to the Obama phenomenon and, of course, the stench from the dead, rotting corpse of the George W. Bush administration.

  That meant Mark Begich had to run for reelection in Alaska, as did Mark Udall in Colorado, and Kay Hagan in North Carolina. They would all lose. And so would longtime Democratic incumbents Mark Pryor in Arkansas and Mary Landrieu in Louisiana. Meanwhile, open seats in Iowa (where Tom Harkin retired) and South Dakota (where Tim Johnson retired) and West Virginia (where Jay Rockefeller retired) and Montana (where Max Baucus had stepped down to become President Obama’s ambassador to China) all flipped to the Republicans as well.

  For me, election night 2014 was pretty much the exact opposite experience from election night 2008. My race was called the moment the polls closed, and we all cheered. Then I spent the rest of the night watching all my friends give somber concession speeches.

  And instead of worrying that I’d screwed everything up for everyone, I kept getting asked what my secret was. How had I pulled off such a big win in such a down year?

  The weekend before the election, on Meet the Press, the political panel was discussing who ran the best and worst campaigns of the year. Chuck Todd had the answer:

  I have to give the award for best to Al Franken. Because guess who we’re not talking about today. Closest Senate election six years ago, Al Franken. Recount, all of those things. How did this guy survive? Six years of a well-run campaign. You have to give that to him.

  A lot of the credit goes to Matt Burgess, who ran my reelection campaign, and the terrific staff he pulled together. In a year when a lot of Democrats were on their heels, our campaign focused on the work I’d done on things like reining in Wall Street abuse and made an aggressive argument for a more progressive economic policy, taking on hedge fund tax breaks and other elements of the “rigged system.”

  The reason we were able to run such a confident campaign, though, was that the people who worked in my Senate offices in D.C. and Minnesota had done such a great job. Led by Casey, my chief of staff, and Alana Petersen, who had been my state director ever since I took office, they made me look good every day, for which I have to remember to stop giving them credit.

  Chuck Todd was right. As he always is.* I didn’t win reelection because of what I did during the two years of the actual campaign. I won because of what I did during the six (well, five and a half) years of my first term.

  It turns out that being a good senator—working hard, sweating the details of legislation, staying focused on the issues that matter to your state, looking for ways to find common ground with the other side even as you stand your ground on your core principles—is good politics.

  That’s especially true when people initially had a lot of doubts about whether you’d be a good senator or even remotely competent. “You’re better than I thought you’d be,” a businessman in Bemidji told me early on in my term.

  “Thanks for having low expectations,” I replied.

  But there is something about barely winning an election that makes you take nothing for granted. And the fact is, I had started getting nervous the day after the 2012 election was over. I was officially “in cycle.”

  In the spring of 2013, I made a quick fund-raising trip to Florida, and while getting on the plane from Miami to Minneapolis I had a conversation that made me feel much better about my prospects.

  “Are you one of my senators?” the young woman asked as w
e waited on the jetway.

  “You a Minnesotan?” I replied.

  “Ya,” she said.

  “Then I’m one of your senators.”

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “Fund-raising. I’m running for reelection.”

  She nodded. “This November?”

  “No, next November.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Is Amy running then, too?”

  “No, she ran last year. She won by a big margin.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t think you’ll have any problem. Everyone says you work really hard.”

  Wow! If that’s what had filtered down to low-information voters, then I must be in good shape. Put that in your model, Nate Silver.

  Still, I didn’t take my opponent lightly. Mike McFadden was a wealthy investment banker with a very telegenic family. One of his five sons, Conor, would always sit up front at our debates with a big grin plastered on his face—which I thought was intended to psych me out until I realized it was a reminder to his dad to smile. Which was really endearing. It made me think of Franni sitting in the front row at my campaign rallies, frantically tugging her ear when she thought I had gone on too long and should wrap it up, which I never did.

  On paper, Mike was a strong candidate: a successful businessman, a Pop Warner football coach, a board member of a Jesuit high school for low-income minority kids, and a political novice who could credibly claim to be an outsider in a year when people were pretty sick of Washington insiders. Like, I guess Mike would say, me.

  But one thing he had going against him was his name: McFadden. You see, before me, there was Norm Coleman, who’s Jewish. Norm had succeeded Paul Wellstone—also a Jew. Paul had beaten Rudy Boschwitz—Jew. My campaign slogan: “Minnesota isn’t ready for a gentile in this seat!” At least that was my slogan at the Jewish Federation dinner.

  Mike made some rookie mistakes, such as telling a reporter that it would be fine with him if the Keystone Pipeline were made with Chinese steel. There’s a reason Minnesota’s Iron Range is called the Iron Range. Mike’s comment didn’t sit well with Rangers who had lost jobs to dumped Chinese steel. As someone who had once been a rookie myself, I felt just terrible watching him step in it like that. No, actually I enjoyed the hell out of it.

  Given Mike’s lack of familiarity with government and the nuances of campaigning and my own work on the granular details of public policy, there was every reason for me to be supremely confident about our upcoming debates. But for some reason, debate prep seemed more difficult than it had six years earlier. The format of one-and-a-half-minute answers followed by thirty-second rebuttals seemed so artificial to me, and, my brain now packed with material from hundreds of nightly briefing binders, I kept giving wonky, almost listless answers that wandered all over the place.

  The day before my first one-on-one debate with Mike, I got a call from President Obama. I’m sure he was calling around the country, checking in on all our 2014 Senate candidates, but it was a nice gesture.

  “How’s it going?” the president asked.

  “Oh, good,” I said. “I’m ahead by ten or so.”

  “Great!”

  “But, you know, Mr. President, I got a debate tomorrow, and for some reason, I’m really nervous.”

  “Uh-huh,” he responded, as if he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “For some reason, I’m having a hard time learning my responses.”

  “Is it because the whole thing seems so phony to you?”

  “Yes!”

  “It’s like you’re learning lines for a play?”

  “Yes! But it’s like I’m at war with my own answers.”

  “Because they’re not exactly what you want to say, and you want to say more?”

  “Yes! Yes! Exactly!”

  “Uh-huh. I’ve been there. Hence, Denver.”*

  Although Mike was a genuinely nice guy, it’s hard to run in a rough-and-tumble political race without getting annoyed with your opponent. I didn’t mind him repeating ad infinitum that I had voted with President Obama 97 percent of the time. But, man, he really hammered that talking point. At one point in a debate, after Mike had said it for the eighth time, I interrupted. “Excuse me. Could you repeat that number again? Is it 97 percent? Let me write that down or I’ll forget it, sure as shootin’.”

  Frankly, the other thing that irked me most was one of his early web videos, in which Mike spoke directly to the camera: “A lot of people have asked me, why do I want to run for the U.S. Senate? Why do I want to put up with the attacks and insults, time away from my family?”

  Yeah, why exactly was Mike running for the U.S. Senate? Oh, wait, I know: He was doing it because he wanted to be a United States senator!

  Let me tell you a little secret about United States senators. We all love being United States senators. We all like having a staff of brilliant young people whose work we can take credit for. We all like having reporters ask us for our insightful takes on crucial issues. We all love being called “Senator.”*

  You’ll remember that in college, after deciding not to be a real scientist, I turned to a major in behavioral science, where I learned some valuable insights into what makes people tick. Take, for example, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

  In 1943, Abraham Maslow formulated his influential Hierarchy of Needs theory to explain what motivates people. Usually these needs are depicted as a pyramid with five levels. The first two levels are considered “basic needs.” At the bottom are “physiological needs”: food, water, warmth, sleep. Next, “safety needs”: basically, security.

  The next two levels are considered “psychological needs.” At level three, “belongingness and love needs”: intimate relationships and friends. Level four, “esteem needs”: feelings of accomplishment and prestige. In other words, being a U.S. senator. Or writing a theory of human motivation that everybody in psychology pays attention to.

  After achieving your physiological (Levels 1 and 2) and psychological (Levels 3 and 4) needs, the very top of Maslow’s pyramid goes to “self-actualization”: achieving one’s full potential, including creative activities. For example, writing a book about being a U.S. senator.

  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

  Every senator is different. Most of us are doing this to make a difference in people’s lives. Most of us are also really into the self-aggrandizing part of the job. The balance between the two is different for everyone. Some of us are more noble than others (I like to think I’m in the top quintile). But we are all human beings.

  As a human being, I relished my 2014 victory as a vindication of all the good work my staff and I had done in the previous five-plus years. But the glow lasted about an hour. Pretty soon that night, my thoughts turned to worrying about a Republican-controlled Senate, our lagging economic recovery, kids living in poverty, global warming, the humanitarian tragedy in Syria, and the possibility that a real lunatic like Ted Cruz might win the Republican nomination in 2016. (Thankfully, that didn’t happen!)

  Then I ate something, hugged my kids and my grandson Joe, and went to sleep in my warm bed with my wife of thirty-nine years, thus fulfilling the first four levels on Maslow’s hierarchy, which is a pretty lucky place to be.

  Chapter 45

  Lies and the Lying Liar Who Got Himself Elected President

  As I watched Donald Trump campaign in 2016, I couldn’t help but think back to my own entry into politics a decade or so earlier.

  Like Trump, I had no previous experience in elected office. Unlike Trump, I was actually bothered by my lack of experience. I compensated for this by absorbing as much information in as much detail as I could. I read everything I could get my hands on. I used my radio show as a graduate education in public policy. I engaged some of the great minds of our time. Did I remember to tell you that Elizabeth Warren was a frequent guest on my show? Have I mentioned that I know Atul Gawande?

  Indeed, it could be argued that in my defensiveness over not having done this before, I sli
ghtly overcompensated during my first run. A stump speech is supposed to be about ten minutes. It’s not supposed to be a discursive forty-five-minute monologue. But there I would be, boring the hell out of forty people at some bean feed, rambling on about my belief that tidal energy could harness the power of the moon’s gravitational pull to help solve our energy crisis, or how the Canadian province of Saskatchewan had led Canada to adopt its current single-payer health care system, or the precise differences between Sunnis and Shiites. Meanwhile, Franni would be madly tugging on her ear (sometimes both earlobes at the same time).

  My whole thought process was that people deserved leaders who knew what they were talking about and were curious about the stuff they didn’t know yet, and who they could count on being dedicated to reaching decisions based on mastery of the subject matter. I figured it was especially incumbent on me, an entertainer, to prove that I knew stuff. You know, as a sign of respect for the voters.

  So you can imagine my frustration when Trump, an entertainer (sort of)*, quickly showed not only that he had no knowledge about the details of public policy, but that he had no interest in learning the details of public policy. In fact, he was actively scornful of learning.

  “I know more than the generals,” he would say. No, idiot†—you don’t. You don’t even know what the nuclear triad is! Hint: “triad” means three! It’s three of something! C’mon, dude.

  To be fair, though, maybe president is more of a “big picture” job. You know, you can hire people who know stuff, like your son-in-law, or some creepy white supremacist.

  So I let that one go.

  But I had another uncomfortable moment of déjà vu when I heard that the New York Times had published a story about some issue with Trump’s taxes. “Gosh,” I thought. “I feel for the guy. I hope he didn’t pay taxes to the state where he was living instead of the states where he gave some speeches.” I recalled from personal experience how embarrassing that could wind up being.