The real Al Franken

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune

Al Franken’s transformation from spicy comic to wonkish senator has been nothing short of breathtaking. Five years ago, the risk of encountering Franken was that he’d tell a funny story of the sort that would make your mother blush. Now the risk is that he’d make your eyes glaze over with the inside dope on Washington legislation. Franken has become, with no irony intended, a serious man.

“Is it as much fun being a senator as it was working on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” he asks, reciting a question he often gets. “The answer is no.” But he goes on to say that people’s careers often take new turns. “This is the best job I’ve ever had,” he says, “because its purpose is to improve other people’s lives, and when that happens everything else is worth it.”

“Everything else” is the endless partisan bickering and systematic dysfunction that have led many ordinary people to give up on government and some scholars to conclude that the Constitution no longer works. But Franken, a Democrat, who’s rated among the half-dozen most liberal senators, insists that there’s another Washington hiding in the nooks and crannies, one that’s fully functional and brimming with bipartisan cooperation, even bipartisan friendship. “That’s really what the job is about,” he says.

Take, for example, the new restrictions on large-scale pharmaceutical compounding that Franken and Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas pushed through the Senate last year. Federal investigators had traced contaminated drugs that caused 750 cases of fungal meningitis and 64 deaths to a careless drug compounding operation in Massachusetts. Its tainted drugs were shipped to 18 states. At a tearful meeting last month in Franken’s St. Paul office, two Minnesota survivors dropped by to thank Franken and to describe the painful illness that continues to threaten their lives. It was a heartbreaking scene. And it showed an emotional side of Franken that most voters haven’t imagined.

 But it also prompts a question as Franken braces for a re-election challenge this year: Who is this new Al Franken? His opponents tend to see him wearing a kind of disguise, beneath which lurks the same old prankster who wrote books like “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” wickedly funny essays with a streak of mean running through them. In short, they doubt the genuineness of the new Franken.

Friends, on the other hand, see common threads running through Franken’s career, from comic to satirist to senator — namely, his intense interest in public affairs, his appetite for detail, and his strong sense of populist outrage, now tempered by age and position. For them, Franken has emerged as a mature version of his former self, or, in political terms, a buttoned-down version of Paul Wellstone, without the fizz.

Franken, himself, traces his political awareness to his father, who grew up a Jacob Javits Republican in New York and eventually moved his young family west, first to Albert Lea, then to the Twin Cities suburbs. Father and son would pull out the TV trays at dinnertime and watch the news together, most memorably the civil-rights drama of the early 1960s, and most vividly the scenes of white police officers attacking and beating black demonstrators. “No Jew can be for that,” Franken recalls his dad telling him.

In 1964, when Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater failed to support the Civil Rights Act, Joe Franken switched parties. And his son began sipping St. Louis Park’s extraordinary brew of politics and art, a mixture that would produce journalist Tom Friedman, satirist Tom Davis, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, and musicians Sharon Isbin and Peter Himmelman, among others. The Blake School, Harvard University and Dudley Riggs’ Brave New Workshop sharpened Franken’s sense of irreverence and launched him toward a brand of politically edged comedy, eventually as a writer and occasional performer on “SNL” and as a talk-radio host who tried to challenge the conservatives’ domination of the air waves.

But Franken’s experience as a public figure did not prepare him for elective office. Early in his Senate campaign, he struggled to find the proper persona between comic and serious candidate. Speaking from the bimah (pulpit) at Temple Israel in Minneapolis, Franken told a graphic Buddy Hackett joke about male genitals. The response was shock and embarrassment. It may have been a moment of clarity for Franken:

What works on the Borscht Belt or in Las Vegas is way, way out of bounds for a politician in the American heartland, especially in a sacred setting.

Later, during the momentous recount that followed the 2008 election, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff in the Senate, Tamera Luzzatto, hammered home a similar point. Don’t take advantage of your celebrity, she told him. Avoid the national spotlight. Keep your head down. Work hard. Take care of constituents. Build a loyal staff. Earn the respect of your colleagues in both parties.