Al Franken, Giant of the Senate Read online

  As we convened our first focus groups in the summer of 2007, our goal was to figure out how to get around the fact that I had an awful lot of edgy, dark, or off-color jokes on the record. Republicans had continued to process joke after joke through the DeHumorizer™, blasting each one out in one irritating press release after another. The question was: How could we fix this?

  At the focus groups, Diane handed people a packet of information about me and asked them to underline the stuff that stood out to them. At one session in suburban Edina, she prodded a bit at the part about my using foul language to attack Republicans, rereading that section aloud: “Franken has a history of using inappropriate language, including the ‘F’ word, and launching personal attacks against public figures including many sitting members of the U.S. Senate. For example, he once said that Republican politicians are shameless dicks.”

  At that, a woman sat up in her chair. “Oh!”

  Diane pounced. “Is it the ‘F’ word, or…”

  There were a few uncomfortable laughs. “I just… I read what was here,” said the woman, turning red. “But I thought it was ‘shameless ducks.’”

  The focus groups were helpful in determining a strategy for handling what from then on was inevitably referred to around our office as the “shameless ducks dossier.”

  The results were actually pretty surprising. A few of the folks understood that I had been using the language for satiric effect. But in general they were not terribly impressed that I’d spent my entire adult life writing stuff like that.

  They didn’t think the fact that I had been a successful comedian meant that I was intelligent. So it turned out that telling people I went to Harvard was a good thing, because it reassured them that despite having no experience in politics and having called some people some bad names, I was probably at least smart enough to handle government work. It was the first recorded instance of it being a good idea to tell people you went to Harvard.

  The books, it turned out, were also a good thing. People liked that I had written books, because it showed that I had several books’ worth of serious thoughts about public policy in my brain, or at least that I had the work ethic to finish writing several books. Basically, the results we got from the focus groups were: Harvard and books—good. Comedy—bad.

  This called for a slight change in strategy. For example, Dusty had tracked down a pallet of kazoos somewhere, and when TeamFranken did parades around the state, we had our supporters march playing “Ring of Fire” and other hits on kazoos. We had fun, but after the focus groups, the consultants made it clear: Get rid of the kazoos. Unless we could find some kazoos with the Harvard logo on them. Dusty said he’d look into it.

  As summer turned to fall, I had company on the campaign trail.

  Back in April, Mike Ciresi had announced his candidacy. Mike was a successful trial lawyer who had represented the state of Minnesota in the big lawsuit against the tobacco industry, famously pressing the case until the tobacco companies released damaging internal documents, and in the end securing a $6 billion settlement. So Mike was well-known, and also rich, and a serious candidate—my main rival for the DFL endorsement.

  But not my only rival. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer was a professor of peace studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, tall, white-haired, and distinguished in that “cardigan sweater, corduroy sport coat” kind of way. Jack’s campaign was built upon three clear issues: peace, the moral urgency of addressing climate change, and single-payer health care.

  I was for all those things in principle, but felt that some of his specific proposals (for example, a 50 percent cut in the Defense Department budget) were not just unrealistic, but irresponsible.

  Then there was Jim Cohen, an effusively friendly gadfly who had once run unsuccessfully for the U.S. House in Connecticut. We’d show up at events and he would proclaim, “You don’t have to be rich [talking about Mike] or famous [talking about me] to run for the Senate.” The crowd agreed, but were also a bit confused about what, having stated what he wasn’t, Jim did bring to the race.

  The four of us found ourselves all showing up at the same events, my blue-and-yellow signs competing for space with Mike’s yellow-and-red gear, Jack’s green, and Jim’s none.

  Meanwhile, I continued to update Chuck Schumer on our campaign’s momentum: We were raising a ton of money, we were rolling up endorsements left and right, and we were taking it to Coleman as best we could. Chuck was happy to hear that things were going well, but still not particularly interested in getting behind me. But over the summer, we’d followed some “advice” (really, a command) from the DSCC and conducted another poll to test our theory that the “shameless ducks” dossier was survivable. The results came in. And when we saw them, we breathed a sigh of relief.

  Armed with our poll, we scheduled another trip to Washington to sit down with Reid and Schumer and make our case. At the meeting, we carefully explained that while Minnesotans did have some concerns about my history of “questionable” humor, we had found a response that worked.

  Reid interrupted. “What kind of jokes are we talking about?”

  We all looked at each other, not sure what to say. Reid tried again, looking at his notes. “It says here, ‘Franken made jokes about the Holocaust.’ What does that mean?”

  Diane handed our poll to Harry and pointed to the joke we had tested: “I think a bad Hanukkah gift for Anne Frank would have been a drum set.”*

  I watched Harry closely as he read the joke and then… burst out laughing. In fact, he started shaking with laughter. It was a surreal moment, sitting nervously with my consultants, watching Harry Reid convulse in hysterics over the idea of Anne Frank playing drums in the attic. Finally, he turned to me.

  I just shrugged.

  Chapter 14

  Icarus Soars

  That fall, I got a letter from my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Molin. It started this way:

  Dear Mr. Franken,

  If you’re the Alan Franken who I taught in the fourth grade at Cedar Manor, then it doesn’t surprise me that you are running for the Senate, because you were a very good student.

  This isn’t my way of telling you I was a very good student in the fourth grade, though I was. It’s my way of telling you about my first campaign commercial. But, seriously, I was a very, very good student in fourth grade.

  Anyway, I looked Mrs. Molin up in the phone book* and gave her a call. “You remember me!?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mrs. Molin. Of course! I remember all my teachers at Cedar Manor.” Then I went through my elementary school teachers, working backward. I loved Mr. Knutson, my sixth-grade teacher. And Mrs. Longabaugh, my fifth-grade teacher. I told Mrs. Molin that she was my favorite, because she was. Then I told her that I didn’t much like my third-grade teacher, whom I will not name here.

  “Well, she wasn’t very nurturing,” Mrs. Molin conceded in her adorable seventy-four-year-old Minnesota accent.

  I invited Mrs. Molin to a campaign event at a house not far from hers. She came, and I instantly remembered why she had been my favorite. Mrs. Molin, still a small package, is a fireball of positive energy. I did the math and realized that she had been twenty-seven when she taught me to do the math. When I told her that in the fourth grade I thought she was kind of middle-aged, she laughed and gave me a little tweak on the cheek.

  When you’re a kid, you don’t usually learn very much about your teachers. Mrs. Molin was one of seventeen children. Seventeen! She and her husband, Dean, didn’t have kids themselves. But over thirty-four years of teaching, she poured her energy and love into her students.

  I ran the idea of Mrs. Molin doing my first ad by my media consultants, Mandy and Saul. I sometimes joked that between me and Norm Coleman (who grew up in Brooklyn and sounded like it), I was the only New York Jew in the race who had actually grown up in Minnesota. What better way to establish my roots than to feature my lovable spitfire of a fourth-grade teacher?

  Mrs. Molin said, “Okay, Alan!�
� and we were all set to go. Mandy was with Hillary working on ads for the battle with Obama that would last almost all the way to the convention. So Saul, whose best work generally involved ripping some deserving Republican a new belly buttonUSS produced an adorable ad featuring Mrs. Molin.

  It was a back-and-forth—Mrs. Molin in a classroom, me at campaign headquarters.

  “So, I read about this man running for U.S. Senate and I thought, ‘That’s the Alan Franken I taught in St. Louis Park.’”

  “I got this letter from Mrs. Molin. She wanted to help with the campaign. So I asked her to be in a TV ad.”

  “A TV ad?” Mrs. Molin offered the camera a perfect look of surprise. But she was immediately game, saying with a swing of her arm, “Okay! Here we go!”

  Then Mrs. Molin gave my bio, accompanied by photos from my life. A nerdy, gap-toothed fourth-grader. Getting my diploma at—that’s right, she dropped the H-bomb—Harvard.

  “He was funny, too,” she said, as we cut to a photo of me with the SNL cast. “I guess that’s why he became a comedian.”

  “I was really more of a satirist,” I protested, still at headquarters.

  “Okay, Alan,” she said, as if to a nine-year-old. Mrs. Molin went on to say I had written six books. Over a stunning shot of the six books piled on top of each other.

  Then to video of me and Franni cooking in our kitchen. “He’s been married to Franni for thirty-two years, and they have two grown kids.” A photo of Thomasin and Joe looking like two nice, clean-cut human beings who share Franni’s and my gene pool.

  “And you know he’s visited our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan four times.” Over pictures of me entertaining the troops.

  Then, the reasons I was running. “In the Senate, he’ll work to make college affordable, fight for universal health care, and end the war in Iraq.” Over pictures of students on a campus, a patient being treated by a friendly, super-competent health care provider, and troops getting off a plane.

  Then a shot of me alongside Mrs. Molin in the classroom. “Thanks, Mrs. Molin.”

  “You’re welcome, Alan.”

  I turned to camera with a delighted smile. “I’m Al… an Franken, and I approve this message, because I’m serious about fighting for Minnesota families.”

  We ran the ad for a couple of weeks right before the caucuses, and it was a huge hit. We started getting emails at the campaign from Mrs. Molin’s former students and forwarded them on to her. Mrs. Molin would share some of them with me. I will never forget one in particular. I read it to teachers all the time.

  Dear Mrs. Molin,

  You were my favorite teacher. I wasn’t a very good student. I had a hard time with math, and your spelling tests were hard! But you saw that I liked art, and I remember you staying after school one day to paint a window with me. You made me feel special (loved). Now I’m a teacher too. I teach special ed kids. And I try every day to make them feel the way you made me feel. And I just wanted to say thank you.

  On February 5, 2008, Minnesotans gathered for their local caucuses. I spent the night running from caucus site to caucus site, giving the quickest stump speech I could to fire up the crowds. But they were pretty fired up even without my help. Barack Obama had brought new energy to the Democratic primary, and new people to the process. Minnesota’s previous record for caucus attendance was around 80,000. That year, we had 214,000.

  Best of all, the overwhelming majority of them were supporting me.

  The people who had been selected as delegates on caucus night would now go on to their county and senate district conventions, where they would elect the delegates who would get to confer the party’s endorsement for U.S. Senate at the state convention on June 7 in Rochester. And since all four DFL candidates had committed to abiding by the convention’s endorsement, that was the ticket to taking on Coleman in the general.

  Everything was falling into place! We had passed our first test with flying colors. But as Minnesota journalist Doug Grow wrote on caucus night, I still had work to do.

  Interestingly, Franken was the most cautious in assessing the situation: “It sounds like we sent a lot of people to the district conventions.”

  That’s not exactly a snappy response, Franken was told.

  “Many a slip twixt cup and lip,” he said.

  A reporter and a couple of Franken supporters looked at the candidate, blankly.

  “What did you say?”

  “You guys never heard that?” said Franken.

  He went slower for the reporter.

  “Many a slip twixt…”

  “Twixt?” the reporter asked.

  “Yes,” said Franken. “Many a slip TWIXT cup and lip.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know who said it,” said Franken. “Google it. But it means a lot can go wrong between the start and finish.”

  Chapter 15

  Twixt Cup and Lip

  On March 10, 2008, the New York Times broke the news that the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, had been a client of a high-end escort service, spending thousands of dollars on prostitutes while serving as New York’s attorney general and in his current position as chief executive of the Empire State.

  Watching the news in my tiny office at campaign headquarters in St. Paul, I was shocked. And more than a little bummed out. I had really admired Spitzer, who had been a crusader for progressive reforms, taking on Wall Street banks and powerful corporations with an incomparable fearlessness, almost a swagger. I had even thought of him as a potential vice presidential candidate in 2008, or maybe someday the first Jewish president. Now all that was out the window.

  The more I thought about it, the more depressed I got. I thought about how hard he must have worked to win his first election, and how many people had helped, and how important it must have been to all of them that he get the chance to make a difference. I thought about all the important work he had done as attorney general and was now doing as governor, and what would happen to his mission of reining in corporate abuse. I thought about other politicians who had made similar mistakes, like Gary Hart, who, confronted with rumors that he was cheating on his wife, dared reporters to follow him. When some reporters actually followed him they discovered that he was in fact cheating on his wife. Hart’s behavior wasn’t just self-destructive—it was batcrapUSS crazy. How could these guys risk everything that they’d worked for like that? How could they live with themselves after letting so many people down?

  While I was staring off into the middle distance, musing about the fallibility of man, a great cheer erupted out in the bullpen. Still lost in thought, I opened the door to my office. By now, our campaign had expanded: We had dozens of staff and interns, most of them frighteningly young, doing—well, at some point I lost track of what everyone was doing, or, indeed, who everyone was. And now they were all running around excitedly, high-fiving and fist-bumping and doing weird young-people hugs, toasting each other with these horrible little 5-Hour Energy shots that everyone seemed to be hooked on. It was like V-E Day.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, to no one in particular.

  Someone interrupted the revelry long enough to fill the candidate in: “Ciresi dropped out!”

  “Oh,” I said.

  It’s not that this wasn’t good news. I was now the presumptive nominee!

  But I was still stuck in my funk, distracted by the tragic fall of Eliot Spitzer. And I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of foreboding. No, I wasn’t worried about getting caught patronizing high-end escorts, or, for that matter, escorts at any price point.

  The truth, however, was that Ciresi dropping out was kind of a mixed blessing. We’d been laser-focused on the convention in June, but now the general election was effectively under way, three months ahead of schedule. We were the dog that caught the car. And in retrospect, it’s clear that we weren’t ready for what was coming next.

  It started with a post on Michael Brodkorb’s blog, “Minnesota Democrats Expos
ed.” Apparently the company I had set up to handle the business side of my writing and public speaking work (called Alan Franken, Inc., or AFI for short), had had a $25,000 judgment filed against it in New York State for failing to carry workers’ compensation and disability insurance from June 2002 to March 2005.

  This was news to me. And that was exactly the problem.

  When you run for office, you generally commission what’s known as a “self-research book” long before you launch your campaign. It’s basically an investigation of yourself that reveals stuff like old workers’ comp judgments so you can take care of them before they’re sprung on you by hostile bloggers.

  We had hired a firm to do that—but we should have hired them earlier. As it happened, they had recently discovered the workers’ comp judgment during a public records search, but were waiting to tell us about it until they had finished looking into it, which I guess would have been a thoughtful gesture had it turned out to be nothing worth worrying about.

  In any event, it was embarrassing not to be able to explain how the screwup had occurred. But it wasn’t a fatal blow. We continued slowly gaining on Coleman in the polls, and even Harry and Chuck were gradually thawing.

  Meanwhile, however, Republicans were digging into AFI’s activities in the state of California, where we had briefly registered the company while I was working on Lateline, a short-lived sitcom I had done for NBC.

  Soon, Michael Brodkorb had another scoop: AFI hadn’t terminated the registration correctly, and when it had stopped paying the small annual “franchise fee,” the registration was “forfeited.” Which sounds bad. And it was embarrassing to get caught off guard again. But it was easy enough to explain: My accountant had simply sent in the wrong form to notify the state that I was no longer doing business there.