Al Franken, Giant of the Senate
Page 37
* According to an estimate from Standard and Poor’s. The estimate could be wrong, though—remember, these were the guys who gave AAA ratings to all those junk financial products, helping to cause the economic crisis.
* I’ve also learned that Harry’s a lot funnier than people think. After a 2011 speech by the president to a joint session of Congress, I headed back with Harry to the Senate chamber through Statuary Hall. On either side of us was what seemed to be the entire Washington press corps. The din was so loud, I knew no one could hear us. So, in full view of the news cameras, I whispered into Harry’s right ear, “Harry, talk to me like I’m important.” Without a beat, Harry turned to me and said flatly, “That would be impossible.”
* Friends of mine ask me why we tolerate Democrats like Ben Nelson. I tell them he’s the only kind of Democrat who can get elected in Nebraska, and we need as many Democrats as we can get. Besides, I like Ben.
* Look, I could explain what a conference committee between the House and Senate is, but it should be clear from the context, and at some point in this book you’re going to have to accept some of the responsibility to figure stuff out for your own damn self.
† During the 2012 campaign, Republicans and their lackeys in the media liked to claim that Obama “owned the Congress for the first two years. They did everything he wanted.” That was Mitch McConnell. Chris Wallace of Fox News put it this way: “The first two years, he had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.” I think they kept using this talking point specifically to drive me insane. The truth is that we held a filibuster-proof majority from September 24, 2009 (when Paul Kirk was sworn in), until February 4, 2010 (when Scott Brown was sworn in)—all of four months and ten days.
* We would later be able to make some minor adjustments through a complicated parliamentary procedure called “reconciliation,” which requires only fifty-one votes.
* Of course, the demographics are very different: McAllen is near the Mexican border and its population is poorer. But the study also included El Paso, which has the same demographics as McAllen but spends half as much per patient.
* According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s index of health-related personal consumption expenditures, my personal favorite index of health-related personal consumption expenditures.
* Two primary care groups each formed Accountable Care Associations, dramatically lowering emergency room visits and hospital readmissions and saving Medicare a total of $26 million in their first year.
* Congress has frequent opportunities to revisit issues like education, because many bills that spend money must be periodically reauthorized—that is, their provisions are set to expire after a certain number of years, forcing legislators to come back to the table to adjust things that aren’t working, make improvements, or reopen the underlying argument altogether. More civics class materials on the legislative sunsetting process, including study guides and suggested discussion topics, are available at—what’s that? We’ve eliminated civics from nearly every school nationwide? Never mind.
* McNamara was CEO of Ford when Kennedy nominated him for defense secretary. A journalist asked an executive at Ford if he thought McNamara was a good choice. “Yes,” the executive answered, “because he doesn’t make small mistakes.”
* That, by the way, is why I was so disappointed when he took one for the team by cutting off questions after one round during the confirmation hearings for Trump nominees Betsy DeVos and Tom Price—I assume because the questions were revealing that DeVos didn’t know the first thing about public education and Price had a long history of suspicious stock purchases. More on those hearings later.
† That’s not thirty million distinct different words. I don’t think there are thirty million words. During their study, researchers found that children from welfare families heard on average about six hundred words an hour. Children from professional families heard twenty-one hundred words an hour.
* Google it.
* Awww.
* It’s called “We Stayed Together for the Kids.” When Orrin and I were working on it in his office, Orrin’s scheduler called my scheduler and said, “I don’t know what’s going on in there. They’re just laughing.”
* The Clinton Justice Department’s report came out in 1997, and the language Ted cited actually came from a 1999 summary of that report. That kind of mistake is very common in the Senate and in life. An innocent mistake, I’m sure, which is rare for someone as meticulous and/or malevolent as Ted.
* I keep track. He’s now a first-degree black belt.
* Here’s a place where the audiobook will be a lot more fun.
* Global climate change is destroying our oceans’ coral reefs, home to our planet’s most bountiful fisheries, and accelerating the rise of jellyfish blooms, which sound mysterious and beautiful but are actually deadly to fish farms.
* Just an example: John would occasionally claim that because of Obamacare, the Mayo Clinic had stopped treating Medicare patients, which really irritated me, and also the Mayo Clinic, which currently treats around half a million Medicare patients.
* Before the deal was approved, I ran into Zucker in New York. “You know, you’re right,” he told me on the condition that I not quote him until after he left NBC. Jeff is now the president of CNN, which is owned by Time Warner. As I write this, AT&T has offered $85 billion to buy Time Warner (which owns CNN), and he seems to be avoiding me.
* Jess McIntosh, my press secretary during my first campaign (and my first year in the Senate), told me she wanted to write a campaign memoir entitled “Oh, C’mon!” Said Franken. Kris Dahl, my driver, threatened to write a tell-all called In the Car.
* Chuck’s great. And I can’t wait to go back on Meet the Press so I can blow more smoke up his butt while I promote this book.
* The president, of course, was referring to his awful performance in the first 2012 presidential debate.
* In fact, when my first grandson was born in 2013, I wanted to have him call me “Senator.” I thought it would be funny. Casey nixed it on the grounds that people wouldn’t get the joke and would think I was a truly pompous jerk. But you get it, right? If so, please email her at casey.adenwansbury@DeHumorizer.org (that’s a think tank she started after leaving my office—it focuses on eliminating humor in public discourse).
* Not only does it offend me that he’s the president, it offends me that he’s considered an entertainer.
† To be clear, I would never call the president of the United States an idiot. I simply have too much respect for the office. This is a reference to Candidate Trump.
* There will be something in this book that is wrong, and if I try to defend it as satire, just know that I’ll be dying inside just a little bit.
* The flip side of the public believing that fake news is real is that they also start to believe that the real news is fake, something that Trump himself had exploited. It is a turn of events that is truly, to coin a phrase, Orwellian.
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