Al Franken, Giant of the Senate Read online

  But the thing we talked about more than anything else was Iraq.

  Lies and the Lying Liars was already on bookshelves by the time it became clear that the Bush administration’s biggest lie wasn’t about tax cuts.

  “There is no doubt,” Dick Cheney had declared in the lead-up to the invasion, “that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

  He was lying. And it’s still crazy to think that he, and the president, and so many others (including, for God’s sake, Colin Powell) just flat-out lied us into a war. Heck, I was in the process of finishing a scholarly masterwork about how they lied all the time, and even I didn’t think they would lie us into a war.

  But by the end of 2003, it was obvious that anyone who had maintained even the barest shred of faith in the administration’s integrity and basic decency had made a mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Worse, it turned out that Bush et al. hadn’t just lied us into a war. They’d lied us into a disaster.

  That Christmas, I went to Iraq for the first time, on a USO tour. USO tours are the best thing I’ve ever done—I’ve done seven now, four of them to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I would spend two weeks doing shows with an eclectic group of entertainers, including NFL cheerleaders and extremely right-wing country stars like Darryl Worley. Franni knew I loved these tours, but one year she said to me in frustration, “You don’t see Bill O’Reilly going on USO tours.”

  “That’s not fair, honey,” I said. “He has no talent.”

  Between shows, we’d hit DFACs (dining facilities) three, four, five times a day. Walking with your tray, looking for a place to sit down, you could see who wanted to talk.

  I learned a tremendous amount on these USO tours. Later, as a senator, I’d go on to visit Afghanistan on a CODEL where we’d meet with top officials, most of whom would tell us exactly what they were supposed to tell us. Traveling with the USO, you could learn a lot more from the privates, lieutenants, command sergeant majors, and one-stars shooting the breeze in the DFACs in between shows.

  Everyone had different points of view. Back then, truck drivers were beginning to get blasted with IEDs. Guys fighting outside the wire were a lot more on edge than guys inside the wire.

  On my first Middle East tour in ’03, while we were at our first stop in Kuwait, troops found Saddam Hussein in a spider hole near his hometown in Tikrit. But even in the flush of capturing Saddam, the message we got was that Operation Iraqi Freedom was not going quite as planned.

  Adding to the cost, both in blood and treasure, was the waste, fraud, and abuse by military contractors during Iraq’s reconstruction. Billions were being ripped off by shady contractors. Work was not completed, or on some projects never started. And the inability to replace the loss of key infrastructure—roads, electricity, water, and sewage—sent the country spiraling further into chaos. Everyone in Iraq was paying the price. So were American taxpayers. And so were our troops, often with their lives.

  Oh, and by the way: Guess who was officially in charge of exposing and reining in the waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq? It’s someone you may remember from earlier in this chapter. No, not Katherine Lanpher. It was Norm Coleman! The newly elected Coleman had been given the plum chairmanship of the hallowed Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, known as PSI. The chairman of PSI is the only United States senator with sole subpoena power. He can investigate anything he wants.

  Originally, PSI had been the Truman Committee in the lead-up to and during World War II. Before the war, Harry Truman—then a senator from Missouri—personally drove around the country in his car to inspect training camps and found widespread mismanagement and downright theft. Because the committee saved millions and so strengthened our war effort, Truman made the cover of Time, and in 1944, FDR chose him as his running mate.

  Truman’s committee did 432 separate hearings on fraud, waste, and abuse in war contracting. While Coleman was chairman of PSI, his committee did exactly 432 fewer hearings on contracting in Iraq.

  I went back to Iraq with the USO each of the next three winters. And every time I went, it seemed like things were getting worse. But even on that first visit, it was clear that some basic problems were not being taken care of.

  In Kuwait, they divided us up to go to different bases around the country. I volunteered to go to Tikrit—Saddam’s hometown and, they thought, a potentially dangerous place.

  As we boarded our plane in Kuwait, a soldier took me aside and suggested that I should make sure I got a flak jacket equipped with modern Kevlar plates. The Vietnam-era flak jacket I was wearing, he said, wouldn’t really stop a bullet. So when I got to Iraq, I should insist on upgrading to the Kevlar. He emphasized the word “insist.”

  I nodded. Insist. Got it.

  When our plane landed in Baghdad, we were transferred quickly to a waiting helicopter for the flight to Tikrit. As I was climbing in, I turned to an airman and said, “Um, I’ve been told to ask for the Kevlar plates for my flak jacket?”

  The airman said, “We don’t have any.”

  “Uh-huh. But I was told to insist.”

  “Well, that’s fine. But we just don’t have them.”

  There was an uncomfortable moment before I tried one last time. “Okay. I’m insisting.”

  “I understand. We don’t have any.”

  So off I went to Tikrit, supposedly the most dangerous place in Iraq, where, fortunately, I was not shot. And neither were the cheerleaders.

  This failure to properly equip and protect our troops would become an ongoing scandal. Right before I went on my third trip in 2005, it came out that troops in Kuwait were going to dumps in search of metal they could use to up-armor their own Humvees. In response to the outcry, Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.” This was particularly galling since the date he said this was further from 9/11 than V-J Day was from Pearl Harbor.

  In preparation for that year’s USO tour, I asked SNL to make a flak jacket out of a garbage can and wore it during my opening monologue at our shows, saying, “We’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that there aren’t any cheerleaders this year. The good news is”—pointing to my garbage can flak jacket—“I’ve got a hundred more of these.”

  The radio show had started with an explicit goal of defeating President Bush in his 2004 reelection campaign. We all worked really hard to take down a guy whom we already were pretty sure was one of the worst presidents in history—and we failed. So 2005 was a pretty dark time for progressives. Just as in 2016, a Republican had won a presidential election despite things that to many of us seemed obviously disqualifying (in Bush’s case it was Iraq and not his entire life story and personality), and now conservatives had a lock on all three branches of government, plus a lie-amplifying propaganda machine.

  But the political infrastructure we’d started to build during the campaign—David Brock’s media watchdog group Media Matters, the Center for American Progress think tank, and even Air America itself—was working to help the progressive movement regroup, get reenergized, and find a new direction.

  Right after he got reelected, President Bush promised to privatize Social Security. We stopped him. And despite Karl Rove’s predictions of a “permanent Republican majority,” we were slowly figuring out how to fight back. We were getting better at debunking Fox News, and learning how to counter the kind of smear campaign that Republicans had run to perfection in 2004, as well as generating powerful ideas of our own.

  When I first started writing about politics, I just wanted to prove that the right-wing figures who got under my skin were liars and frauds. I was in what I now think of as the “get it off my chest” phase of my political development. But now it felt like I was part of something bigger—a real movement to change the direction of the country.

  By the summer of 2005, I was working on the follow-up to Lie
s: The Truth (with Jokes). Except this time, instead of just making fun of the Bush administration’s mouthpieces, I found myself focusing more on making the case against the Bush administration itself and its terrible policies.

  The last chapter of The Truth, “A Letter to My Grandchildren” (named Hillary, Barack, and Joe III),* flashed forward ten years to October 2015, and told what I hoped would be the story of the intervening decade, one in which Democrats would take back Congress in the 2006 midterms, changing the political landscape by offering a slew of great ideas and setting the stage for a Democratic president to be elected in 2008. Then we would pass all sorts of legislation, beginning with universal health care and an “Apollo” Project for renewable energy, and continuing on to tackle tax fairness, public education, and increasing youth turnout by legalizing voting by AOL Instant Messenger.†

  Oh, and in this scenario, I would be elected to the Senate in 2008.

  I hadn’t forgotten about the whole “99 percent improvement” thing. And as Iraq fell apart, Norm Coleman’s failure to perform his oversight responsibilities was only making me more sure that somebody, indeed, had to beat this guy.

  But by now I was beginning to think that maybe—just maybe—that somebody should be me after all.

  Chapter 8

  Year of the Bean Feed

  In late 2005, I told a friend that I was very seriously considering running for the Senate.

  “Why would you do that?” he asked incredulously.

  “Well,” I said, “I think I could accomplish a lot. And what do I really have to risk?”

  My friend looked dubious. “Um, public opprobrium?”

  The truth is, no one debating whether or not to run for office is worried about the upside. The problem is the downside. Sure, as an empty nester who had already had a successful career, I was playing with house money. But while the stuff in the “pro” column was pretty compelling—I was confident I could do a lot of good, it would feel great to beat Coleman, and also, like a lot of people, I kind of really wanted to be a senator—there were a lot of what Donald Rumsfeld charmingly referred to as “known unknowns.”

  For example: Would I be a good candidate? Did I know enough about the issues? Could I deal with the long hours and the tough questions and the personal attacks and the groveling for money?

  What if I sucked at it? What if I hated it? What if voters hated me? What if I lost a race that someone else could have won? What if I was humiliated? What if I had to give a concession speech where I graciously congratulated Norm Coleman on his victory? And what was “opprobrium,” anyway?

  Most of all: Was the risk of things going wrong worth the potential good I could do (and fun I could have) if things went right?

  There were a lot of questions. And I didn’t know the answers. But I told Franni, “I don’t want to not do the things I’ll want to have done if I decide to run.”

  “What?” replied Franni.

  “Never mind. You know how we’ve been talking about moving back to Minnesota and maybe running for the Senate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “Oh. Okay. Sure. If that’s what you want to do, honey.”

  As in most marriages, my wife and I have a division of labor when it comes to the day-to-day operations of our household. Basically, it’s this: Franni’s in charge.

  I had a vision: I wanted to buy a house near where I grew up, in the western suburbs of Minneapolis. Something a little bigger, of course, with a nice big yard. Franni said no. Absolutely not. She told me that a house requires constant upkeep and that she’d end up having to do it, because I’d be doing the radio show and going all around the state of Minnesota while she had to deal with every plumbing problem or beetle infestation.

  So instead of a big house with a big yard and bad plumbing and a beetle problem, Franni found us a town house very near downtown Minneapolis. Less upkeep, less hassle, and, best of all, I could walk to work.

  We broadcast the show from atop the historic Foshay Tower, which when I was a boy was the city’s tallest building, smugly thrusting its antennae into the innocent Minneapolis sky. But modern skyscrapers now tower above the once proud Foshay, which cowers meekly among the indifferent glass and steel.*

  In my free time, I started laying the foundation for a potential campaign. That meant learning as much as I could about Minnesota issues and getting as much advice as I could from key political players. And it meant showing up everywhere I could to rally DFLers† across the state for the critical 2006 midterm elections—a sort of dry run for what my own campaign might be like.

  I also set up a political action committee (PAC), which would allow me to meet big-shot donors, gauge my fund-raising appeal, and build some goodwill by supporting deserving candidates in Minnesota and around the country.

  Setting up a PAC is a lot easier than it might sound. Basically, you just appoint a treasurer (I picked my high school buddy Tom Borman), fill out a four-page form available on the Federal Election Commission’s website, and, voilà, you have a PAC.

  I named mine Midwest Values PAC, drawn to the clever acronym MVP. Unfortunately, MVP.com already directed to the online store for CBS Sports. Bastards! I thought about just giving up on the whole Senate thing. But no. We would overcome this first hurdle and just buy midwestvaluespac.org. Not as good. But as I would learn, politics is the art of the possible.

  Things got easier, mostly because I hired some people who knew what they were doing. Dinah Dale, a soft-spoken Arkansan who had overseen Paul Wellstone’s fund-raising operation, was in charge of connecting me with wealthy progressives who might be interested in contributing to my PAC.

  Dinah brought in another Wellstone alum, A. J. Goodman—a lawyer who had defended murderers and drug dealers in Miami before she turned to the more high-stakes, cutthroat world of political fund-raising—to set up MVP events around the country.

  We also started a direct mail fund-raising program. Turns out, the number one determinant of whether someone gives money in response to a mail solicitation is whether or not they open the envelope. And because I had something of a following from my books and radio show, instead of just tossing my envelopes into their trash cans—or, if they were environmentally conscious, their recycling bins—people tended to open them.

  Inside, they’d a find a letter that didn’t sound exactly like every other fund-raising letter they were getting. Mine began, “Dear Person I’m Asking for Money.” Moderately amused liberals from coast to coast sent in contributions.

  Midwest Values PAC was off and running. The money we raised wasn’t for me. The point was to give it away to progressive candidates and causes in Minnesota and around the country. And for me to get credit for it. Smart, huh?

  Next step: coffee. A lot of politics gets done over coffee. That’s true all over the country, but especially in Minnesota. Minnesotans just love coffee.

  My first coffee was with my friend Jeff Blodgett. Jeff had been the campaign manager for all of Paul Wellstone’s Senate campaigns. As fiery and passionate as Paul was, Jeff is calm and measured.

  Jeff kind of looks like a prototypical Minnesota guy. Trim, clean-cut, the kind of man who spends thirty years of his life looking like he’s forty-five years old. Jeff is reserved but intense. Also, not funny.

  He gave me lots of sound advice about where I should go and who I should meet. But the one piece of advice that I remember most vividly was Jeff’s suggestion that, as an exercise, I write a five-minute speech without any jokes in it. “Why,” I thought, “would anyone want to do that?”

  I was a comedian. All the validation I had received in my career had been for making people laugh, even if I was talking about something serious. Clearly, I had a lot of learning to do.

  I was insanely busy. There was the three-hour daily radio broadcast, for which I stubbornly insisted on actually preparing every night. There was national travel, where I’d take the show on the road in conjunction with book signings and pr
omotional appearances for our local affiliates. There was fund-raising for MVP. There was a lot of coffee. And of course, there was traveling around Minnesota. Which brings me to bean feeds.

  Bean feeds are essentially the organizing medium of DFL politics. They are exactly what they sound like. People show up, maybe make a small donation to the local chapter of the party, they eat, and there’s a speaking program.

  To be clear, not every bean feed is literally a bean feed. There are burger bashes, spaghetti dinners, corn feeds, and walleye frys. But the classic bean feed—for example, the one in Kandiyohi County—is the best. It’s basically a potluck, with tables filled with assorted bean dishes. Baked beans. Bean salads. Chili (with beans). And other bean dishes.*

  Why go to all these bean feeds? Not just for the food. Minnesota has a caucus system, through which the DFL and Republican parties “endorse” candidates for office. The folks at the bean feeds are the people who participate in the caucuses, get elected as delegates to the state convention, and decide who gets their party’s endorsement.

  The upshot of all that is that if you want to serve Minnesota in the United States Senate, you start by going to a lot of bean feeds.

  Of course, I wasn’t running for the Senate in 2006. Amy Klobuchar, now our senior senator, was. And thank goodness, because I learned a lot about how to run for the Senate by watching Amy.

  No human being works harder than Amy Klobuchar. If Amy wasn’t at a bean feed I went to, then her husband, John Bessler, and their daughter, Abigail, were there. If John and Abigail weren’t there, Amy’s father, Jim Klobuchar, the beloved Star Tribune columnist, was there. If none of them were there, I wondered, “Why am I here?”

  Following Amy’s example, I tried to show up everywhere I was invited. Fortunately, I had plenty of invitations. And because I wasn’t actually running, I felt free to ignore Jeff Blodgett’s advice and mix in a healthy dose of The Funny.