Al Franken, Giant of the Senate Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Al Franken

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor.

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Twelve

  Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition: May 2017

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  ISBN 978-1-4555-4043-3

  E3-20170620-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  1. Why I’m a Democrat

  2. How I Became a Comedian

  3. Saturday Night Live (Not the Drug Part)

  4. Saturday Night Live (The Drug Part)

  5. Saturday Night Live (The Part Where I Leave)

  6. Paul

  7. A 99 Percent Improvement

  8. Year of the Bean Feed

  9. The DeHumorizer™

  10. I Attempt to Litigate Comedy

  11. Hermann the German and the Pull-Out Couch

  12. No Joke

  13. Harry and Chuck

  14. Icarus Soars

  15. Twixt Cup and Lip

  16. Public Opprobrium

  17. My First Powwow

  18. Tax-Dodging, Rape-Joking Pornographer for Senate

  19. Franni Saves the Campaign

  20. “Has It Gotten That Bad?!”

  21. “It’s Close, It’s Very Close”

  22. The Recount

  23. Welcome to the NFL

  24. I Actually Become a Senator

  25. My First Big Win*

  26. What Gets Me out of Bed in the Morning

  27. The Case of Perry Mason’s Lost Case

  28. The Angel and the Devil

  29. Never Give the Staff Credit

  30. Letting My Id Run Amok

  31. I Screw Up

  32. Operation Curdle

  33. Health Care: Now What?

  34. I Meet George W. Bush

  35. The 64 Percent Rule

  36. My Republican Friends

  37. Sophistry

  38. Bulletproof

  39. Cracks in My Soul

  40. The Koch Brothers Hate Your Grandchildren

  41. No Whining on the Yacht

  42. I Win Awards

  43. We Build a DeHumorizer™

  44. I Get Reelected

  45. Lies and the Lying Liar Who Got Himself Elected President

  46. I Attend a Presidential Inauguration

  47. Being as Good as the People We Serve

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Al Franken

  Mission Statement

  To Paul and Sheila

  Based on actual events

  Foreword

  An Optimist’s Guide to Politics

  In the eight years since I came to Washington, probably the question I’ve been asked more than any other is some version of this: “Is being a United States senator as much fun as working on Saturday Night Live?”

  The answer has always been NO!!! Why would it be?

  When people ask me my favorite moment from my fifteen seasons at SNL, I always tell them it’s all the late Tuesday nights or very early Wednesday mornings when the show got written on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rock, when I was rolling on the floor laughing at a line that Dan Aykroyd or Gilda Radner or my partner Tom Davis just came up with or a character that Dana Carvey or Chris Farley just invented. Nothing could be more fun.

  That said, I’ve always told people that representing my home state of Minnesota in the U.S. Senate is, without a doubt, the best job I’ve ever had. I get to wake up every morning and go to work on behalf of five and a half million people—taking their best ideas to Washington, fighting for what they need to make a better life, and improving their lives in real, tangible ways.

  Which would often prompt them to ask, “Are you talking about the same U.S. Senate that is one of the two bodies in today’s U.S. Congress? And isn’t today’s Congress just an unrelenting horror show?”

  The answer is YES!!! Today’s Congress is a polarized, dysfunctional body, rendered helpless by partisanship, more focused on scoring short-term political points than on solving our nation’s urgent problems. In short, the Washington of the past decade has been awash in nincompoopery.USS*

  And that was before Trump.

  Watching Donald J. Trump take the oath of office to become the 45th president of the United States was perhaps the most depressing moment I’ve had since I entered politics, although that record has been repeatedly surpassed since January 20. The heartless and counterproductive Muslim ban; the barrage of racist and/or corrupt and/or unqualified staff appointments and Cabinet nominees; the unhinged tweets attacking anyone who opposes his agenda; the constant, constant, constant lying—Trump’s presidency so far has been one shock to the system after another.

  And while we’re still finding out exactly how bad, and exactly what specific kind of bad, President Trump will be, it seems very likely that things in Washington are going to get worse before they get better.

  Indeed, people have stopped asking me whether I’m having fun in my new career. These days, the question I get more than any other is some version of this: “What the hell do we do now?”

  We’re all going to have to figure out the answer together. But, as unpleasant as my job is going to be in the coming months and years, I’m still glad to have the chance to be part of the fight. And, really, while nobody could have prepared for the grim reality of a Trump presidency, when I look back at my own political journey, I can’t help but feel like I’m as prepared as anyone could be for this moment.

  This book is the story of that journey.

  It’s the story of a midwestern Jewish boy of humble roots (the first in his family to own a pasta maker) who, after a thirty-five-year career in comedy, moved back home to challenge an incumbent senator.* It’s the story of how a satirist who had spent a good part of his career heaping scorn and ridicule upon conservative Republican officeholders developed a solid working relationship with (many of) his Republican colleagues. It’s the story of how a novice politician learned not just how to win an election, but how to be good at serving in office: how to find common ground when possible, but also stand his ground when powerful interests come after the middle class. It’s the story of how, after spending a lifetime learning how to be funny, I learned how not to be funny.

  This book will be different from other books written by U.S. senators. For instance, I’m not going to write stuff like, “Mitch McConnell and I may disagree, but when we’re off the clock, we’re the best of friends—sometimes we go to dinner and Mitch will laugh so hard that milk shoots out
of his nose.” No, I’m not going to be writing clichés like that.

  Instead, I’m going to tell you what it’s really been like to go from writing political satire to actually being in politics. I’m going to tell you how Washington really works. And I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned about the direction of our country and our prospects for the future.

  Is what I do more fun than Saturday Night Live? Not by a long shot. But this book will tell you why, despite all the hugely disheartening moments I’ve experienced since I got into politics, I still think I have the best job in the world (some days) and why, despite the rise of Trump, I’m still (kind of) optimistic about our future (most of the time [albeit certainly less than I was a few months ago]).

  —Al Franken

  Washington, D.C.

  Chapter 1

  Why I’m a Democrat

  I was born in the house I built myself with my own two hands.

  I’m sorry. That’s not true. I got that from my official Senate website. We really should change that.

  Let me start over.

  My dad, Joe Franken, was born in New York City in 1908. When he was sixteen years old, his dad, Otto, a German immigrant, died of tuberculosis. So Dad went to work and never ended up graduating from high school. In 1955, when I was four years old, Dad moved us from New Jersey out to a little town in southern Minnesota called Albert Lea to open a quilting factory.* The factory failed within two years, and our family moved up to St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis.

  When I was a teenager, I asked Dad, “Why Albert Lea?”

  “Well, your grandfather† wanted to open a factory in the Midwest. And the railroad went through Albert Lea.”

  “And why did the factory fail?”

  “The railroad went through Albert Lea, but it wouldn’t stop.”

  Dad wasn’t a good businessman. But he was a great dad. And we were a very close family.

  Most evenings, Mom, Dad, my brother, Owen, and I would sit together eating dinner on tray tables watching Huntley-Brinkley or Walter Cronkite. And because we grew up during the civil rights movement in the early ’60s, we learned some important lessons while we did.

  Civil rights, our parents taught us, are about basic justice. And when the news would be full of southern sheriffs turning firehoses, dogs, and nightsticks on demonstrators, my dad would point to the TV and he’d say in his gravelly New York voice, “No Jew can be for that!”

  Until 1964, Dad had been a liberal Republican.* And Mom was a Democrat. I took after my dad, so until I was thirteen, I was a Republican, too.

  But Dad switched parties when the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, a guy who had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.† LBJ was right when he told an aide that Democrats would lose the South for a generation when he signed that bill. But he got my dad. And, therefore, me.

  In Minneapolis, Dad made a modest living as a printing salesman, and Mom supplemented our family’s income by working as a real estate agent. The Frankens never struck it rich—I spent my Wonder Years in a two-bedroom, one-bath house. But I considered myself the luckiest kid in the world. Because I was. I was growing up middle-class in St. Louis Park, in Minnesota, and in America at the height of the middle class in America. I believed I could do anything I wanted (except possibly open a quilting factory—I had learned that lesson the hard way).

  For most of my childhood, I thought I was going to be a scientist of some sort. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, my parents, like the rest of America, were terrified. The Soviets had nuclear weapons and now were ahead of us in space. So my parents marched me and Owen into our living room, sat us down, and said, “You boys are going to study math and science so we can beat the Soviets!”

  I thought that was a lot of pressure to put on a six-year-old. But Owen and I were obedient sons, so we studied math and science. And we were good at it. Owen was the first in our family to go to college. He went to MIT, graduating with a degree in physics, and then became a photographer.

  I went to Harvard, and became a comedian. My poor parents.

  But we still beat the Soviets. You’re welcome.

  I met my wife, Franni, during our first week of college. When our daughter, Thomasin, was six years old, her first-grade teacher assigned the kids to write about how their parents met. This was before parents met on Tinder (or Grindr, for that matter). I told her, “I met Mommy at a freshman mixer—that’s a dance. And I saw her across the room, organizing a group of girls to leave. And I liked the way she was taking charge. Also, she was just beautiful. So I asked her to dance and we had a dance. And then I got her a ginger ale. And then I escorted her to her dorm and asked her for a date.”

  My daughter wrote it this way: “My dad asked my mom to dance, bought her a drink, and took her home.”

  Franni’s family was not as lucky as mine. When Franni was eighteen months old, her father, a decorated World War II veteran, died in a one-car accident returning home from his shift at the paper mill near Portland, Maine. My mother-in-law, Fran,* was widowed at age twenty-nine with five little kids. The oldest, Kathy, was seven. The youngest, Bootsie, was three months old.

  Fran heroically raised her kids on Social Security survivor benefits and her paycheck from working in the produce department of the nearby supermarket. Sometimes they had the heat cut off. Or the phone turned off. Sometimes—often—there wasn’t enough to eat.

  While my childhood could be fairly described as carefree, Franni’s was almost entirely carefree-free. She started working at age eleven, and every penny went to keep her family above water.

  But they made it. All four girls went to college on combinations of Pell Grants and scholarships. My brother-in-law went into the Coast Guard, where he became an electrical engineer.

  When Bootsie was old enough to go to high school, Fran got herself a $300 GI loan to enroll at the University of Maine. She got three more loans and graduated with a teaching degree. Because she taught Title I kids—poor kids—all her loans were forgiven. Every member of Franni’s family made it to the middle class. And they did it because of Social Security, Pell Grants, the GI Bill, and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

  They tell you in this country that you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And we all believe that. But first you’ve got to have the boots. And the federal government gave Franni’s family the boots.

  When I think about the values that motivate me to this day—the values that brought me (in a very, very, extremely roundabout way) to politics—I think back to my childhood, and to Franni’s. I think about the economic security that was the birthright of middle-class families like mine, and the opportunity that was available for families like Franni’s who wanted to work their way up into the middle class.

  That, as I wrote in this year’s Senate Patriotic Essay Contest,* is what America means to me.

  And that’s how it’s supposed to be for every kid in America. You’re not supposed to have to be rich or lucky to have a chance to do great things. Opportunity is supposed to be for everyone.

  And that’s why I’m a Democrat.

  You see, Democrats are still the party of civil rights (and with each passing year, Republicans seem less and less interested in competing for that title). But Democrats aren’t just the party of equality for all—we’re the party of opportunity for all. We’re the ones who want to give people the boots. We’re the ones who stand for the middle class and for those aspiring to it—not just because it’s the fair thing to do, but because it’s the smart thing to do. It’s how our country has always worked best.

  My friend and political hero Paul Wellstone, who once held the seat that I now hold in the United States Senate, had a great way of putting this. He said, “We all do better when we all do better.”

  So simple, so profound. “We all do better when we all do better.” It’s almost like a haiku, if I knew what a haiku was.

  Which I don’t.

  Chapter 2


  How I Became a Comedian

  I wrote my first show in second grade. One afternoon, the girls in Mrs. Morrison’s class surprised the boys by presenting a little revue for us that we all considered very corny. It included, I swear, “I’m a Little Teapot.”

  So I got the boys together and we wrote a scathing parody of the girls’ show. A few days later, we told Mrs. Morrison and the girls we had a surprise for them in the AV room. During the show, some of the girls cried.

  Mrs. Morrison was a wonderful teacher, so she turned that sow’s ear into a silk purse: “Why not have Alan write a show that the boys and girls can do together for your parents?” I have a vague memory of just one sketch for that show. It was a Civil War sketch where the joke was anachronisms. While nurses were attending to wounded soldiers, they all heard the news of Lincoln’s assassination on the radio.

  Not funny? I was SEVEN!

  As much as Mom and Dad wanted me and Owen to go to college and win the Cold War, the fact that I chose to become a comedian had everything to do with them.

  My mother was my first audience. She was a stay-at-home mom until I went to kindergarten, so when I was little, we’d spend the day together, and I’d love to make her laugh. This is a little embarrassing, but here it is. When I was three years old, Mom would have me do my impression of Jackie Gleason’s signature “And away we go!” for company. My guess is there may be something not entirely healthy there, but I’ll save that for my next book, The Sorrow and the Gavel: The Sad Inner Lives of U.S. Senators.

  Dad loved comedy, and I loved watching it with him and Owen and Mom in the TV room. His absolute favorite was Buddy Hackett.

  Now, Dad inhaled a pipe all his adult life. When I was a kid, if Dad got on a laughing jag, he’d start coughing at some point and inevitably end up coughing up phlegm into the clean, neatly pressed white handkerchief he always carried in his right front pocket. So if Johnny Carson said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Buddy Hackett!” Mom would get up and leave the room. But the phlegm didn’t bother me and Owen.