No Running Jokes Here
With His Eye on a Senate Seat, Comedian Al Franken Says It's Time to Get Serious

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 17, 2007

BECKER, Minn.

Al Franken, U.S. Senate candidate, is telling a joke:

Some years ago, he tells a crowd of about 150 at a meet-the-candidates spaghetti lunch, his daughter had to write a school essay about how her parents met. So Franken told her: He spotted his future wife, Franni, across the room at a freshman mixer in college. He asked her to dance. They talked. He bought her a ginger ale. Afterward, he walked her back to her dorm, where he asked for a date. End of story.

His daughter, Franken says, wrote up the innocent tale this way: "My dad asked my mom to dance, bought her a drink and took her home."

The crowd laughs, politely.

The story isn't exactly hilarious. But as Franken's most famous "Saturday Night Live" character, self-help guru Stuart Smalley, used to say, that's . . . okay. In fact, that's the plan.

Franken doesn't want to be funny these days, not really funny. Wit has its place in politics, he says, and people always like a laugh. But funny can be a distraction from the serious stuff Franken is trying to talk about, such as veterans' health care, global warming, his opposition to the war in Iraq, etc. Besides, Franken has always had funny. What he needs, as a candidate, is gravitas.

So after a lifetime of making people laugh, Franken tries to sound deadly earnest -- even, in truth, a little ponderous at times -- as he seeks the Democratic nomination in Minnesota, his home state. Since February, when he announced his candidacy, he's been crisscrossing the state in a hybrid SUV, speaking at dozens of spaghetti dinners, picnics and meet-and-greets, all with a singular mission: To convince people that his evolution from wacky satirist to talk-radio pundit to serious statesman is real and complete.

Here in Becker, a tiny (pop. 4,048) prairie town an hour northwest of Franken's home in Minneapolis, the candidate sticks to some well-rehearsed lines as he addresses activists from Minnesota's evocatively named Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in a barn of a restaurant called Gily's Bar and Grill. Franken tells them how he grew up as the son of a printing salesman in suburban Minneapolis, in a middle-class household -- "two bedrooms and one bath," he says. "I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world, and I was."

His tone changes, however, as he talks about his wife's childhood. Franni Franken's father died in an accident when she was 17 months old, leaving her mother, then 29, to raise five children on her own. With the help of Social Security survivor benefits, Pell college-scholarship grants and GI Bill loans, Franken says, his mother-in-law managed to keep her home and family together, and raised the children to become productive adults. "They" -- meaning conservatives -- "tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and I agree with that," he tells the crowd. "But the government gave my wife's family the boots and the laces."

The crowd begins to murmur.

Franken's big windup is a riff about meeting with college students, "many of whom were too young to remember a president who was articulate." As the audience whoops, he adds, "They don't remember when America was the most respected country in the world, a country that defeated fascism and communism, rebuilt Europe after the war, sent a man to the moon, mapped the human genome, and had enough juice left over to invent the Internet and rock-and-roll."

The applause is generous. Afterward, Franken is mobbed.

It's true that actors and even pro wrestlers (see: Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota) have crossed over to high office. But a comedian who once declared the 1980s "the Al Franken Decade"?

Franken says later that he decided to run because he's "worried" about the country; because he's tired of George Bush; and because he doesn't like Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent. Franken can sound especially bitter when he's talking about the senator. Coleman won the seat in 2002 after Democrat Paul Wellstone -- Franken's political hero -- died in a plane crash 10 days before the election, and Franken and Democrats haven't quite gotten over it during the past six years. "He's George Bush's number-one enabler," Franken declares.

To those who would dismiss him as a mere comedian, Franken has a ready response. Out on the stump, he disarms audiences with an oft-used line: "Let me tell you what a satirist does," he says. "A satirist looks at a situation and sees the inconsistencies and hypocrisies and absurdities, and cuts through the baloney and gets to the truth. And I think that's pretty good training for the U.S. Senate. Don't you?"

Franken, in fact, had been considering a run for several years. He moved back to Minnesota from New York in 2005. He then set about raising and giving away money for state Democratic candidates, many of whom have repaid him by endorsing his candidacy.

Franken's political consciousness predates that, however. "Saturday Night Live" producer Lorne Michaels says Franken always harbored political passions, many of them barely disguised. Way back in "SNL's" earliest days, he remembers, he had to talk Franken out of heckling Spiro Agnew when the disgraced former vice president visited NBC.

Now, thanks to 15 seasons on "Saturday Night Live," his books (five bestsellers) and three years hosting a liberal talk show on the struggling Air America radio network, Franken has the name-recognition for a statewide run. He has money, too. He's raised some $10.4 million so far, in good part due to help from showbiz friends in New York and Hollywood such as Michaels, Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. Early polls show him running neck and neck for the Democratic nomination with Mike Ciresi, a wealthy trial lawyer. Coleman holds a slight lead over both in a head-to-head race.

Franken knows, however, that his past cuts both ways. After decades on TV and radio, he has a long and voluminous record of saying, doing and writing things that may not endear him to a majority of voters.

Minnesota Republicans have been quick to highlight some of Franken's more colorful opinions in an effort to paint him as "Angry Al," a hotheaded ideologue. Ron Carey, the state GOP chairman, has noted in newspaper op-eds that Franken once called former secretary of state James Baker a "lying scumbag"; blasted former attorney general John Ashcroft as "something of a nutcase"; and once said that only "[expletive] idiots" think that Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the 20th century. When Franken announced his candidacy in February, Republicans issued a press release pointing out that Franken, in a magazine interview last year, described Coleman with a term suggesting that he was sexually subservient to the president.

Franken also has been candid about his past drug use, particularly during the heady early years of "Saturday Night Live." In "Live From New York," an oral history of the program co-written by James A. Miller and The Washington Post's Tom Shales, Franken acknowledged, "I only did cocaine to stay awake to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine. That was the only reason I did it. Heh-heh."

Such negatives aren't likely to win Franken many votes among Minnesota's more socially conservative voters next year, says Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota. "The perception of Franken and how he's doing is much more positive on the East Coast and the West Coast" than in the state, he says. "Democrats in Minnesota are asking questions about whether he's electable, whether he can get past 47, 48 percent" in a statewide election.

For added irony, Franken, 56, has spent a good part of his adult life making fun of politics. Just a couple of years out of Harvard, Franken achieved pop-culture immortality as one of the original writers and longest-running cast members on "SNL." Among his many bits, he co-wrote the classic "Dukakis After Dark," in which he imagined the 1988 Democratic nominee conceding defeat to George H.W. Bush at a wild party. The skit aired a few weeks before the election. "You know," says the Dukakis character, "the one thing that really hurt us is that Reaganomics really works. It really does!"

Post-"SNL," Franken slashed conservatives and distilled his liberal worldview as an author, starting with his first book, "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot and Other Observations" in 1996. One of his books, "Why Not Me?" (1999), was a real art-imitates-life affair. In it, Franken imagines himself running for president as a single-issue candidate -- he's against ATM fees -- and winning.

These days, on the campaign trail and in interviews, Franken keeps the yuks to a minimum. He speaks energetically but cautiously, repeating and recycling the same bits of his stump speech. It's tough to throw him off message. Some of this discipline may reflect the tutelage of Mandy Grunwald, the veteran Washington political consultant who also advised Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Indeed, Franken is plainly the most polished of the four leading Democrats vying for the nomination, each of whom showed up in Becker to address the candidates' meeting. His principal Democratic rival, Ciresi, is a tough-sounding but charisma-less bantam of a guy who stresses his legal victories over corporate opponents, including his role in the state's $6.1 billion settlement with the tobacco industry in 1998.

After the meeting, as Franken hangs around to sign autographs and pose for pictures, his talk seems to have impressed at least one couple, Gennady and Karen Bronshteyn, from nearby Elk River. "I'll vote for him," declares Gennady, a 39-year-old businessman. "He seems very knowledgeable about the issues. He's an advocate for regular people. I know what he's for and what he's against."

However, Karen, 41, a librarian who has read his books, recognizes Franken's potential weakness. "I imagine he's sensitive to the criticism that he's a comedian, that he's not serious," she says. "But I'm hoping [his fame] will help him win. I think he can win."

Franken still has some big hurdles to clear. A November poll taken by Survey USA found that 37 percent of voters viewed him negatively -- the same "negative" rating as Coleman. But while 36 percent expressed positive feelings about Coleman, only 22 percent of voters said that about Franken.

Some of the chilliness, Franken says, is a result of Republican efforts to tag him as a celebrity whose values are out of touch with Minnesotans. Franken shrugs it off. "When Minnesotans find out a few things about me," he says, sipping a milkshake in a deserted Becker coffee shop after his appearance at Gily's, "they'll find the caricature of me looks ridiculous."

Find out what?

That he grew up in Minnesota and was smart enough to get into Harvard; that he's been married for 32 years ("many of them happy," he can't resist joking) and raised two children. That he's volunteered for seven USO tours since 1999, entertaining U.S. service people in places such as Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. That he's been endorsed by 45 state legislators, and unions representing steelworkers, teamsters, firefighters and government employees.

One of Franken's most enthusiastic supporters is Michaels, the "Saturday Night Live" impresario. "Al was always a truth teller," Michaels says. "He just did it by being funny. . . . His strength and his weakness is, there's nothing he won't talk about. He can be brutally honest."

Perhaps as a result, Franken risks being framed as "the Ann Coulter of the Left," says Joseph Kunkel, a political science professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Unlike other entertainment figures who've run for office -- Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson or Ventura -- Franken can't easily escape his past by claiming he was merely acting, Kunkel says: "He is who he is. It remains to be seen if he can put the sarcastic stuff in the closet. He's always one comment away from putting his foot in his mouth."

Franken also seems to have left his flanks open on another issue: Iraq. Franken says he was "torn" about the run-up to the war, which suggests he toggled between opposition and support. In fact, he didn't. Franken has said on several occasions that had he been in the Senate in late 2002, he would have voted to support the resolution that gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

Franken regrets that position now. "I believed Colin Powell," he says in the coffee shop interview. "I didn't think the president would mislead us into war." He adds that he was a vigorous critic of the war during the three years, 2004 to 2007, he hosted a daily radio show on the liberal Air America network. He also says he favors tying further funding of the war to a specific timetable for withdrawal of American forces.

Both Ciresi and Coleman have used Franken's statements to score points, but from opposite directions. In what is perhaps a preview of a Franken vs. Coleman race, Coleman's campaign last week posted a series of audio and video clips on its Web site of Franken making seemingly contradictory statements about Iraq. "Al Franken? This time he's not joking," reads the final frame.

Ciresi, who says he has been consistently against the war, says Franken "believed the people he called liars. My whole issue is: Why?"

All of which helps reinforce Franken's wariness on the campaign trail and in media interviews. He knows that his political opponents are literally watching -- the state GOP has assigned a "tracker" to tail Franken and tape his public appearances. So he watches his language, and does the sorts of hokey things a politician is supposed to do but that a satirist would make fun of. Around Thanksgiving, his campaign Web site was posting recipes ("Franni's Pureed Butternut Squash").

In other words, Franken reins in some of his natural Franken-ness, tacitly acknowledging a critical fact: No one votes for a smart aleck.

This summer, for example, he campaigned in New Ulm, a Minnesota town settled by German immigrants. In the town's center, a memorial reflecting this heritage is dominated by a statue of a historical figure named Hermann -- Hermann the German. Franken thought up "the dumbest joke" he could come up with. Noting that he grew up in St. Louis Park, a heavily Jewish suburb outside the Twin Cities, Franken thought of telling the townsfolk of New Ulm that in his town they had a statue of "Stew the Jew."

"I'm thinking, this will be twisted into something, like he's saying that the people in this town bear some responsibility for the Holocaust," Franken says.

He skipped the "Stew the Jew" crack.

"I'm not doing this to be the funniest guy in the Senate," Franken concludes. "I'm doing this to reverse the direction that this country has been heading. I'm doing this because I'm concerned."

Moments later, Franken finishes his milkshake and gets up to leave the empty coffee shop. Before he heads out into a wet, mushy snow, he can't resist one last attempt to spin his own story. He implores a reporter against writing the "usual" profile of him.

The reporter tries turning the tables. How would Franken write his own political profile?

Franken considers, but not for too long: "I'd write, 'He's solid and substantial and has a tremendous intellect!' "

He's kidding. Well, he might be. With Al Franken these days, it's kind of hard to tell.