Al Franken, Giant of the Senate Read online

  But this time, with Norm up by just 725 votes heading into the canvass, it did matter. The canvass reduced his margin to 215 votes.

  How? Well, here’s an example: In rural Partridge Township, the tape from the voting machines showed that Norm got 143 votes to my 129. Those results were written on a form and delivered by hand to the county seat, Pine City, where they were to be typed into a computer and submitted to the secretary of state’s office.

  But the county worker typing in those results accidentally entered just 29 votes for me—he or she missed the “1” key on the keyboard. It was the kind of mistake anyone could have made, especially at the end of a long election day. And during the canvass, when someone checked that 143–29 total against the original forms, the mistake was discovered and corrected. Which meant 100 votes got added to my total.

  The entire canvass actually produced a relatively small shift in votes compared to previous statewide elections (for example, in 2006, Amy Klobuchar’s margin increased by 2,854 votes during the canvass—no one cared, though, because she had won by more than 400,000 votes). But because it resulted in Norm’s already very small margin becoming even very smaller, his campaign freaked out.

  Panicking at the realization that Norm’s emphatic declaration of victory might have been premature, they immediately cried foul, describing the entirely routine correction of errors like the one in Partridge Township as “statistically dubious and improbable shifts that are overwhelmingly accruing to the benefit of Al Franken.”

  A tone had been set: The 725-vote lead Norm held the morning after the election would henceforth be treated as the only credible result. Any change to that margin (at least, any change that wasn’t in his favor) would be treated as evidence that I was trying to steal the election.

  Then we were on to the hand recount, which is just that: Election officials recount each individual ballot by hand.

  That’s possible in Minnesota because of our voting technology. Optical-scan machines read paper ballots that voters mark by filling in a circle, like on an SAT test.

  So, much of the process involves looking at a ballot that is clearly marked for a candidate and saying, “Yup, that ballot is clearly marked for that candidate.”

  But occasionally it can be unclear whether a given ballot should or shouldn’t be counted, or which candidate it should be counted for.

  For example: A voter might have screwed up the filling-in-the-circle instruction. Or a voter who had changed her mind might have filled out the circle for one candidate, crossed it out, and filled out a circle for another candidate. Or a voter who had brought a hot dog into the voting booth might have gotten mustard on his ballot.

  In any event, the election judge makes a call as best he or she can. But each campaign gets to have representatives present who can challenge that call if they disagree. If a ballot is challenged, it gets set aside to be adjudicated by the State Canvassing Board, which for my recount consisted of two Republican appointees, two Democratic appointees, and an Independent appointee.

  By the end of the recount, the Canvassing Board was handed a pile of 1,325 disputed ballots (out of 2.9 million cast, counted, and recounted). They examined each one, by hand, in public, during lengthy and tedious sessions live-streamed on the Internet.

  In the end, the board split 3–2 on just fourteen ballots. They split 4–1 forty-five times. But they were unanimous on all the rest.

  And when they were done, I was up by 49 votes.

  One more wrinkle: Some voters had tried to cast absentee ballots, only to have those ballots rejected. And our team discovered that some of those absentee ballots shouldn’t have been rejected. So we went to court to make the case that wrongly rejected absentee votes should be counted. We didn’t know who the votes were for, but we figured we might as well stick with the position we had adopted from the outset: “Count every legal vote.” Coleman stuck with his “I won, screw you” position.

  In the end, the court ruled that 933 wrongly rejected absentee ballots should in fact be counted. But by the time they were to be opened, Norm wasn’t in the lead anymore. I was. Which made it even more nerve-racking to watch those ballots be opened for the first time, live on the Internet: “Franken… Franken… Coleman… Barkley… Franken… Coleman…”

  Fortunately, they wound up breaking in my favor, and my lead grew from 49 votes to 225, which is the margin the Canvassing Board certified on January 5, declaring me the winner. Yay.

  Where the hell was I during all of this? In my house, mostly, calling people for money to pay our bafflingly large and expensive team of lawyers, led by Democratic super-attorney Marc Elias (if you’re ever in Washington, check out the Franken Wing of the Perkins Coie law office—it’s gorgeous).

  True to form, Stephanie Schriock had a plan in place for an eventual recount. And my role in that plan was to raise the money to pay for it, and nothing else.

  You see, I learned something very important during the recount: not to trust my instincts. For example, when I heard Coleman suggest that I step back and let the healing begin, my instinct was to respond with something biting and sarcastic. But, wisely, my team told me to shut up. Which I did.

  And wouldn’t you know it, as the weeks, and then months, passed, Minnesotans seemed to appreciate it. One day, as I was grocery shopping, a woman came up to me and said, “I like the way you’re handling the recount.” I held up the avocado I was inspecting and said, “You see this avocado? It’s handling the recount the exact same way I am.”

  In fairness to me, the avocado didn’t have to spend six to eight hours a day calling wealthy avocados to raise lots and lots of money to pay for its many, many lawyers.

  When the State Canvassing Board declared me the winner, I finally spoke to the press for the first time since the recount had begun. I tried to strike a conciliatory note. “I know this is not an easy day for Norm Coleman and his family,” I said, “and I know that because Franni and I and the kids have had plenty of time over the past two months to contemplate the possibility that this election would turn out differently.”

  Pretty gracious, don’t you think?

  I wrapped up my remarks and immediately flew to Washington so I could be sworn in with the rest of the new senators the next day, January 6.

  Except, of course, that didn’t happen. Thanks to the delay caused by Norm’s unsuccessful election contest and his subsequent unsuccessful appeal of his unsuccessful election contest, it would be almost exactly six more months before I could get to work in the Senate.

  Which meant for six months Minnesota would only have one senator: Norm’s term had expired, and with no one there to replace him, Amy Klobuchar’s office had to handle double the constituent service duty, which doesn’t sound like a big deal unless you’re a Minnesotan trying to get help with a late Social Security check.

  It also meant that President Obama had one less Democratic senator there to help him rescue the economy (as you’ll see in a few pages, Republicans had no interest in helping at all). Which oddly didn’t seem to trouble the new president. Soon after Norm filed his election contest, Schriock got a call from a top Obama adviser, who proudly informed her that a check for $20,000 from the Democratic National Committee to help pay our legal bills was on its way.

  “Don’t you dare do that,” Schriock barked. The Coleman campaign had just received a million dollars from the Republican National Committee. A check for $20,000 from the DNC would be worse than getting nothing.

  She called her friend Jim Messina, who had become the president’s deputy chief of staff, to make that point. Sheepishly, he asked, “So, you were expecting something with another zero?”

  “Another two zeroes,” Schriock responded.

  Ultimately, we got the one extra zero ($200,000). And when I visited Washington shortly after, I got a promise from that “top Obama adviser” that the new president (whose approval rating was well over 60 percent) would do a fund-raiser for me. He never did. But, again, overall: great pres
ident.

  In almost every other state, the governor and secretary of state would have signed an election certificate as soon as I won the recount, and I would have been seated provisionally in the U.S. Senate along with the rest of my Senate class while the legal contest was being resolved.

  Not in Minnesota. According to Minnesota state law, Governor Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie could not sign the certificate until all state legal remedies had been exhausted.

  But after I won the recount, I learned from my lawyer, Marc Elias, that Harry Reid wanted to find a way for the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate to seat me anyway.

  No way, I told him. It just felt wrong. Minnesotans are big into fairness. We love process. And besides, I told Elias, I might want to get reelected.

  “You’d have six years to figure that out,” he countered.

  But I stood firm. I was totally committed to letting this happen however it was going to happen. After the recount, I knew I had in fact received the most votes, and that it was just a matter of time until I got to Washington, the right way.

  And in that sense the six-month delay was actually a lot harder on Norm than it was on me. He had lost, and now his legal team was grasping at straws to find some way to reverse his defeat. For me personally, those six months were the most relaxed and enjoyable period of my life from the moment I announced my campaign to, well, right now.

  I still had to raise money like crazy. But Franni and I actually got to go out to dinner once in a while instead of just eating peanut butter out of the jar in our darkened kitchen after getting home from a campaign event at two in the morning, like we’d been doing for two years.

  We even took a vacation! Although, actually, it was terrible. Schriock insisted that we get out of town for a while, escaping the Minnesota winter for Key West, home of Margaritaville and key lime pie. But we spent the entire miserable week trying to get the Internet to work and then sitting in front of Franni’s laptop watching the live stream of the election contest.

  It could have been worse. Poor Norm didn’t get to eat any key lime pie. He came to court every day and sat somberly at his lawyers’ table, looking somewhat like a husband on trial for murdering his wife.*

  Coleman’s election contest made a variety of charges of impropriety and unfair treatment, each of which fell apart under the scrutiny of the three-judge panel appointed to hear the contest (one Democratic appointee, one Republican appointee, and, again, one Independent appointed by Jesse Ventura). But all they succeeded in doing was getting another 351 previously rejected absentee ballots counted (which increased my margin to 312 votes).

  The judges threw out Norm’s contest in a unanimous tripartisan decision. I emerged from my house to give yet another magnanimous victory speech, and that was that.

  Except, of course, that still wasn’t that. Coleman appealed the case to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which would eat up another two months. By now, he had gone from throwing Hail Marys to simply delaying the inevitable. Which was actually the point.

  In April, Republican senator Arlen Specter announced that he was switching parties, giving Democrats fifty-nine votes in the Senate. Once I was seated, we would have a filibuster-proof sixty-vote majority.

  Never mind that nobody thought an appeal would have any chance of succeeding. Republicans may have been disappointed that they didn’t win the seat, but they could at least draw this out as long as possible.

  It wasn’t until June 30 that the Minnesota Supreme Court denied Coleman’s appeal. Norm called me that day to concede, which he did with notable grace. “It’s the best job you’ll ever have,” he told me.

  “Norm,” I said, “it couldn’t have been any closer.”

  Later, I would tell Schriock, “I guess I really don’t hate him after all.”

  “Ha!” she cried. “I knew it!”

  Once again, I emerged from my house to magnanimously declare victory. The election had been in the fall. I had won the recount in the winter. The contest had been dismissed in the spring. And now, on a glorious summer day, it was finally over.

  The moral of the story? Well, for one thing, if you’re going to declare a victory that you know full well might not hold up under the scrutiny it’s about to receive, maybe try to underplay it a little. Also, if you’re a law student with a lot of debt piling up, might I suggest a career in election law?

  But, really, the moral of the story is that, as corny as it sounds, your vote can make a huge difference—and your activism can make an even huger one. When you win a race by 312 votes (out of 2.9 million cast!), it’s hard not to think about all the individuals who each literally could have been the one who got you elected. I know a lot of Minnesotans who talked to more than 312 voters, or dropped more than 312 pieces of literature, or gave us twenty bucks so we could run a rural radio ad that reached more than 312 people.

  So when I go to DFL events in Minnesota now, I have a lot of people to thank—and I have to thank them effusively, because each and every volunteer could have been the one who made the difference between winning and losing.

  Chapter 23

  Welcome to the NFL

  After Norm Coleman’s election contest was thrown out in April, it was obvious to everyone that I was going to be seated sooner or later. And when Arlen Specter switched parties two days later, making me the presumptive filibuster-busting sixtieth Democratic vote, my imminent arrival in the Senate became what Joe Biden would call a big freakin’USVP deal.

  Specter had joined Biden in the Senate in 1981, so the two had served together for nearly three decades, and it was the vice president who had brokered Specter’s party switch. As part of the deal, Specter got to keep his three decades of seniority, meaning he would be well positioned to snag big committee chairmanships over more junior Democrats even if they had been part of the caucus for years. Also a big deal. But something that a lot of Democratic senators weren’t thrilled about.

  Then, in a May 5 interview with the New York Times, Specter, now a Democrat, was asked who he wanted to win in Minnesota. He said Norm Coleman. Evidently Arlen had forgotten that he had changed uniforms. It gave disgruntled Democratic senators a great excuse to strip him of his seniority and send him to the back of the line within the caucus, which they did in an elaborate ceremony involving a sword, a candle, and a silver Masonic trowel made by Paul Revere.

  A couple of days later, Schriock, Franni, and I headed over to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Biden, who I’d always been a big fan of.

  The three of us were ushered into the vice president’s office in the West Wing, where we waited for just a few minutes before Biden walked in and warmly welcomed us. Then, sitting on the couch across from us, he turned very serious.

  “I’ve been in this town forty years,” he said. “And let me tell you how you succeed in this town—how I got here.” He leaned toward me to bring home the import of what he was about to say.

  “Never promise anything you can’t deliver. Never. Promise. Anything. You can’t deliver.”

  I nodded. I understood. I wasn’t going to do that. I. Wasn’t. Going. To do that.

  Then he turned to the little unpleasantness regarding Specter. The vice president wanted to make sure I wasn’t offended and wouldn’t hold it against Arlen.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Just tell Arlen that I know it was a rookie mistake.”

  This brought a small, slightly pained laugh from the vice president. Then, “No, I won’t tell him that.”

  I nodded. Okay.

  Then he turned to business. “Listen. You’re going to be seated soon. Might be a week. Might be a month. But you’re going to be seated. And we’ve got to get you something. We need to get you something that you can deliver right away for the people of Minnesota.”

  This sounded good.

  “Is there anything you can think of?” he asked.

  “Well…” I hadn’t prepared for this. “I guess completing the Northstar Line? That’s the comm
uter rail line that’s supposed to go from Minneapolis to St. Cloud.”

  The vice president nodded. It was a brilliant nod, because it was utterly ambiguous. Maybe he knew what I was talking about, maybe he didn’t. God, he was good at this.

  “But, see, right now it only goes from Minneapolis to Big Lake? Which is about halfway to St. Cloud?”

  “Right.”

  “And, well, right after the stimulus passed, you went to St. Cloud, and you said that we were going to complete the line with the money from the stimulus.”

  Another nod. Yes, he remembered. “How much is that going to cost?” he asked.

  “I think $135 million?” I knew that was a lot. But it was a $787 billion stimulus bill.

  Biden considered it for a couple of seconds, then nodded decisively. “Then that’s what we’re going to do! A few days after you get seated, we’ll announce that we’re going to complete that line—and we’re gonna give you the credit.”

  Wow! That’s great!

  “So, this is how things work,” I thought. “Not so hard, this whole senator thing!” It wouldn’t be long before I was the crafty veteran, a giant of the Senate in my own right, doling out wise, if slightly patronizing and rather obvious, advice to newbies. The vice president and I shook hands and then he gave Franni and Schriock nice hugs.

  We left the veep’s office feeling good. As we were headed out, we walked by Ron Klain’s office. Ron had been Vice President Gore’s chief of staff and was doing the same job now for Biden. Ron popped out and said hi.

  “How’d it go?” he asked cheerily.

  “Really well!” I said, beaming. “He said we’re going to get the Northstar Line finished up to St. Cloud!”