Al Franken, Giant of the Senate Read online

  One of the stories Margie told me became a mainstay of my stump speech. It involved an incredibly promising seventeen-year-old girl from a Hmong family* who was doing college-level work as a junior in high school. But she had lupus. And her family earned just enough money to no longer qualify for MinnesotaCare, a program that covered low-income families in the state. The girl lost her health insurance.

  Lupus is a chronic disease, and the medication that controls it is extremely expensive. The girl told her parents to stop buying it so they could afford to take care of the other kids in the family. It broke their hearts, but she was right: They couldn’t afford the medicine, not with everything else weighing on the family budget. So they stopped buying it.

  The next time Margie saw the girl was six weeks later, back in the hospital. But this time, she was in the emergency room, suffering from renal failure. She had to be put on dialysis, and doctors thought she might have to be on dialysis for the rest of her life.

  “Now, that’s wrong,” I would tell crowds that had invariably gone quiet by this point in the story. “But it’s not just wrong—it’s stupid! How much is it going to cost our system to give her dialysis throughout her life? And how much is this going to cost her, in terms of her potential and her quality of life?”

  According to the most recent data when my campaign began, there were 46.6 million Americans living without health insurance, including 21.5 million who worked full-time and, worst of all, 8.3 million children. And on my radio show, I talked about this issue all the time with guests like Elizabeth Warren, who told me that half of all bankruptcies in America were tied to a medical problem.

  But at bean feeds, I met people who had lived it. Or who would tell me about their sister or their cousin who had lived it. And traveling around Minnesota, stopping in cafés and coffee shops and VFW halls, I couldn’t help but notice the flyers up on bulletin boards announcing barbecues or potlucks or spaghetti dinners to benefit families that had gone broke because someone had gotten very sick or been in a terrible accident.

  Getting to universal health care was always going to be a central focus of my campaign. But now, instead of talking about it just as a policy issue, I was also talking about it as a personal issue—because that’s what it was for so many Minnesotans.

  After that first event, we hit the road, holding two jam-packed labor rallies in northeastern Minnesota—one at the Labor Temple in Duluth, and another at a union hall in the tiny town of Nashwauk on the Iron Range.

  The Range sits on the richest deposits of iron ore in the country. “Rangers” have been providing the iron ore for America’s blast furnaces for well over a hundred years. You may never have wondered where the ore for your blast furnace comes from, but if you have, the answer is that almost certainly it comes from the Iron Range.

  The Range is largely Democratic because Rangers are heavily unionized. But they like their guns, they’re socially conservative (though they have a lot more bars than churches), and even though Rangers live in and care for one of the most beautiful parts of the country, they’re not terribly fond of environmentalists. I know what you’re thinking: These sound like the kind of Democrats who wound up voting for Donald Trump. And you know what? You’re right. A lot of them did.

  I got along well with Rangers in part because I was a member of four unions myself: the Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the Directors Guild.

  Labor in Minnesota didn’t really care that my unions were in jobs where you don’t get your hands dirty, or lift stuff, or fix anything except a script. What they cared about was that I paid my dues—literally, that I was a member in good standing. And that I understood what labor has done for this country. Unions gave us the forty-hour workweek, the weekend, and the middle class.

  As we kept traveling the state, I met countless people at informal coffee-shop get-togethers, or while I grabbed a bite at restaurants, or just waiting in line to pee at a SuperAmerica. The stories people told me began to inform what I said on the stump—and they still inform what I do as a senator.

  For example, at one point early on in the campaign, we started doing roundtables on college campuses—small events where I’d try to do more listening than talking. The skyrocketing cost of college was always the first thing that would come up: Back when kids like Franni had used them to go to college, a full Pell Grant paid for 80 percent of a college education, but now it was down to 35 percent.

  Students I met were working twenty, thirty, even a full forty hours a week just to pay tuition—and that’s in addition to going to school full-time. Then, at a roundtable at MSU-Mankato, I met a student named Casey Carmody, who told me that despite working forty hours a week, he still couldn’t afford his tuition—so he’d resorted to selling his blood plasma.

  In the car between events, I’d look out the window at the beautiful Minnesota landscape and think about how these issues I’d spent so many years talking about really affected people, resolving to do something to improve their lives.

  Okay, that’s not true. Mostly, I made fund-raising calls, because that’s what you have to do in the car. But sometimes, while I waited for people’s outgoing voicemail messages to finish so I could leave a message inviting them to a fund-raiser, I thought about Margie’s lupus patient. Or Casey Carmody, selling his blood to get an education. Or the miner in Hibbing who asked me, “What are you gonna do to protect my pension?” Or the parents of soldiers serving in Iraq who asked me whether I could do anything to bring their son or daughter home.

  We finished our kickoff tour with a big Saturday afternoon rally at my junior high school in St. Louis Park, just a couple blocks from where I grew up. Twelve hundred enthusiastic supporters ignored a driving snowstorm and packed into the gym, with hundreds donating and signing up to volunteer.

  When I got home from the St. Louis Park rally, I decided to check out the prestigious Internet to see if anyone had had any reaction to our incredible display of grassroots energy. I quickly found a website called “Minnesota Democrats Exposed,” where I read a headline saying something to the effect of, “Disastrous Turnout at Franken Rally.” Underneath was a picture of a nearly empty gym with our campaign signs hanging forlornly on the walls. Apparently whoever had taken the photo had gotten in early and shot it before the crowd was let in.

  I showed this to Andy, who said, “Yeah. That’s Michael Brodkorb. He’s a right-wing blogger.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well. He doesn’t seem very ethical.” I was more confused than angry. Why would anyone do that?

  You may be thinking, “Aren’t you the guy who wrote several books about how Republicans love to lie?” I know. I guess it’s just a little different when it happens to you.

  But I have to say, it was hard to resist the impulse to set the record straight when Republicans and their mouthpieces would lie about me, even when it was something small like how many people had shown up for a rally.

  And it was even harder when they would lie about my career in comedy. Every time I was attacked (very often unfairly) for something I’d said or written, I’d say that I understood the difference between what a satirist does and what a senator does, and assure Minnesotans that I wouldn’t embarrass them in Washington. Which was true. But it always felt a little wrong. What I really wanted to do was put these words back through a ReHumorizer and turn them back into jokes again.

  Unfortunately, there’s a saying in politics: “When you’re explaining, you’re losing.” As I would eventually learn (if not necessarily accept), in a campaign, you can’t correct every intentional or accidental misinterpretation of your words, or your record, or your ideas. And you especially can’t litigate comedy.

  Chapter 10

  I Attempt to Litigate Comedy

  Shortly after the campaign began, Eric Black, a political writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, asked to interview me on the topic of how my comedy past was relevant to my run for office.

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sp; I was thrilled: Eric seemed to me to be an incredibly sharp journalist and I was confident that he would understand, and relay to his readers, how my career as a comedy writer and satirist had prepared me for politics by training me to pick out absurdities and inconsistencies and speak truth to power.

  My team was horrified. But I was very committed to winning this unwinnable argument. So Andy called in reinforcements.

  Jess McIntosh, 25, was the communications director for the state DFL Party, and had a well-earned reputation for talking candidates out of doing stupid things that they wanted to do. Andy set up a phone call to have Jess talk me out of doing the interview with Eric.

  It went very well. Jess explained a few things. First and foremost, the campaign was trying to get the media to focus less on my career in comedy and more on my public policy positions.

  Oh. Right. I remembered that.

  Also, she continued, even though she was sure I could explain the relevance of my previous career in a very clear and convincing way, no matter how persuasive I was, there was no guarantee that Eric’s story would end up being helpful.

  Eric shared a blog with a conservative columnist named Doug Tice, who also happened to be the Star Tribune’s political editor. Both were obsessed with what Tice referred to as my “outbursts,” which, he opined, were “too crude” to print.

  As a work-around, Tice referred readers directly to “the estimable Michael Brodkorb of Minnesota Democrats Exposed.” Yup, the same not-very-ethical guy who had lied about our rally in St. Louis Park.

  For example, Tice linked to a Brodkorb post about a line in Lies and the Lying Liars in which I joked that I wanted to title my next book I Fucking Hate Those Right-Wing Motherfuckers!*

  Now, remember a few chapters ago, when I mentioned that my next book after this one will be called The Sorrow and the Gavel: The Sad Inner Lives of U.S. Senators? Did you laugh at that? No? Not even a little? Wow. You’re a tough nut to crack. Okay, but you got that I am not actually planning to write a book with that title, right? You picked up on the irony? It would be ridiculous for a United States senator to write that book. And that’s why it’s a joke.

  Well, this was another example of the same comic trope. In Lies, I had been refuting Republican attacks on the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism strategy, and examining the shortcomings in approaches to fighting terrorism under Presidents Reagan, H. W. Bush, and W. Then I wrote:

  But you know what, I don’t want to get into a whole partisan politics thing here. Not in this book, anyway. We’ll leave that for my next book, I Fucking Hate Those Right-Wing Motherfuckers!, due out in October 2004. I’m hoping it will “fire up the troops” for the final weeks of the campaign season.

  The joke, of course, was that I was already being partisan in my very partisan book entitled Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. But I was doing it in an austere, civil tone, which contrasted with the vulgarity in the fake title—I’m sorry. I know this is pedantic. But it’s also kind of obvious, right?

  After the phone call in which Jess talked me out of helping Eric Black with his blog post, we hired her as press secretary. And on her first day, she staffed me at an event at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs in Minneapolis. It was a panel of important political people, and the audience was made up of important political people who weren’t on the panel.

  After the program, we spotted Gwen Walz, a friend and the wife of Congressman Tim Walz, in the crowd. Jess suggested I go say hi.

  As she tells it, “Until that day, I never understood when mothers of missing children would say, ‘I only had my back turned for a second.’ I only had my back turned for a second. When I looked back, there was Gwen, walking toward the door, Al-less.”

  Where was Al? I was standing in an aisle, surrounded by important Minnesota politicos, picking a fight with Eric Black. Now, going at it in public with a widely respected political journalist is a bad idea for a candidate under any circumstances. What made it worse was the substance of the argument. I believed that Eric understood that I Fucking Hate Those Right-Wing Motherfuckers! was a joke. And I wasn’t going to back down until he admitted it.

  “C’mon, you know I wasn’t going to write a book with that title! No one could possibly think I was going to write a book with that title!! YOU COULDN’T EVEN SELL THAT BOOK IN A BARNES AND NOBLE, FOR GODSAKES!!!”

  Jess sprinted over, making her way through the gathering circle of rubberneckers, and put her hand on my back, our team’s signal to me that it was time to go (a signal that I never once successfully interpreted during the entire campaign). “Hey Eric,” she said, “if you’d like to continue this off-the-record chat, just shoot me an email. We have to go now!”

  It was a long and quiet drive back to headquarters. When we arrived, Jess told Andy what had happened, expecting to be fired on the spot. Andy just sighed. “Yeah, well. He’ll do that.”

  Later, Jess and Andy explained to me that sometimes reporters will pretend not to understand something, or play devil’s advocate, just to see how you’ll react. They want to know what puts you on the defensive, what makes you angry, what gets a rise out of you. Eric wasn’t being purposefully obtuse.

  “How do you know that?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t pretending not to understand something, isn’t that being purposefully obtuse?”

  Andy and Jess could see they had to concede that point to get to the real point. Which was that there is no percentage in arguing with the press. If I wanted to win this election, I was going to have to let go of things.

  “Let go and let God,” I nodded.

  Now Jess and Andy were confused. “It’s an Al-Anon expression,” I explained.

  “Fine,” said Jess. “Let go and let God. Great. Whatever. Just don’t argue with reporters, okay?”

  I nodded again. “I get it. So treat the press like they’re alcoholics.”

  “What?!” said Jess, visibly regretting taking her new job. “No. That’s… no. Just… just don’t argue with reporters.”

  I felt like we had all learned some valuable lessons. I learned that in politics, unlike in show business, being right doesn’t give you the right to be a jerk. I learned that even though aggressively challenging every misstatement and contesting every minor argument had helped me write three New York Times number one bestsellers, it wouldn’t help me win this race. I learned that campaigns have their own rules, their own laws of physics, and that if I wasn’t willing to accept that, I would never get to be a senator.

  I would have many more opportunities to learn these lessons over the course of the campaign, because, frankly, they never really sank in.

  And for their part, Andy and Jess had learned never to let me out of their sight again, not even for one second.

  Chapter 11

  Hermann the German and the Pull-Out Couch

  That night I went home and told Franni that I had messed up.

  Franni said, “Okay, listen. You’ve spent most of your life as a comedian. When you said something, all that mattered was, ‘Is it funny?’ Now you’re in a totally different situation. Before you open your mouth, you have to ask yourself three questions.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  “First: Is it true?”

  “Of course,” I insisted. “That’s my thing. That’s what I do.”

  Franni nodded. “I know, honey. Okay. Second: Is it necessary?”

  “Uh-huh. Like what I did today with Eric Black wasn’t necessary?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay,” I asked, “what’s the third thing?”

  “Is it strategic?”

  “And the thing today was not strategic.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  I knew, of course, that Franni was right. I had always thought that I could make a seamless transition from comedian to satirist to activist to candidate to senator and then someday, at long last, host of “Weekend Update.” And some things
did come easily. For instance, I’d always been something of a wonk and had followed politics and public policy all my life. So learning about the issues—countercyclical payments on agricultural commodities, workforce training programs, the importance of the 148th Fighter Wing to Duluth’s economy—was something I enjoyed.

  But I would also have to learn a set of weird and occasionally sociopathic Politician Skills.

  For example, you may be familiar with the phenomenon of “trackers.” A tracker is someone who works for your opponent’s campaign and follows you around with a video camera waiting for you to do or say something incredibly damaging—like telling a baby you’re going to raise its taxes or pushing an elderly constituent to the ground.

  Republicans had started tracking me early, before I had even announced. And right away, my driver/body man—a tall, self-effacing twenty-three-year-old from Moorhead, Minnesota, named Kris Dahl—had come up with a plan.

  Every time we got out of the car, we’d pretend we were in mid-conversation. Kris would emerge from the driver’s side first. Stepping out of the passenger side, I’d say, “Kris, I don’t know why you don’t just buy the pull-out couch.”

  “They’re uncomfortable,” he’d explain.

  “They used to be. But new technology has changed everything. The pull-out couch people have made some huge advances in recent years. Go to a showroom,” I’d tell Kris, pretending I didn’t notice the college kid walking backward four feet in front of me holding up a video camera.

  “I don’t know,” Kris would say, clearly racked with indecisiveness.

  “Kris, you don’t need a two-bedroom apartment!” I would yell as the tracker stumbled on the curb, barely maintaining both his balance and his grip on the camera. “I’m telling you, man, the pull-out couch will pay for itself in six months!”