“Blake was a school chartered for Protestants,” Franken said. As it happened, Blake was looking for kids just like him. “My parents told us, ‘You boys have to study math and science so we can beat the Soviets.’ I thought that was a lot of pressure to put on an 11- and a six-year-old, but my brother and I started playing math games in the living room.”įranken turned out to be a whiz in science and math, and when his brother went off to MIT, the family began to look for a better secondary school for Al. ![]() “My brother and I were Sputnik kids,” he began. In his Senate office, settled into the obligatory leather couch, he leaned forward and looked back. There is no better question to ask Al Franken. Joe Franken was a printing salesman, yet Al attended Blake, generally acknowledged as the most exclusive private school in Minneapolis. In 2008, if he got that far, he would be running not only against Coleman, but also against Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and every pundit who thought his candidacy was a bigger joke than any he’d written for Saturday Night Live.Īlan Stuart Franken, now 60, was born in New York, but his father, seeking opportunity, moved his wife and their two sons to Minnesota when Al was young. And it certainly wasn’t that he feared his opponent Franken had little respect for Coleman, whom he called, in print, “a suit.” Franken’s problem was his résumé: a long career as a comic, followed by a decade of attacks on the Republican right. It wasn’t just that he was a neophyte who lacked a campaign team. For Franken, the bar was considerably higher. But with Wellstone gone and no charismatic Democrat on the Minnesota horizon, he began to consider the possibility of running against Coleman in 2008.įor an established politician, that would mean endless dinners in small-town community halls-and fending off challengers. Because Minnesota had regularly produced progressive candidates, Franken had never given serious thought to political office. ![]() What is it about their work that gives them a sense of a job well done? As a comedian, I know I’ve done my job when people laugh….What do you suppose gives Rush Limbaugh that warm glow?”įranken grew up sharing what he calls the “basic Minnesota values” of Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Paul Wellstone-universal healthcare, fairness for the little guy. To say Franken was livid would be to understate: “Rush and the Republican Party and the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal and Fox-and then it was CNN and MSNBC and all the newspapers that wrote hundreds of stories-got it wrong….Sometimes I wonder why people do what they do for a living and how they feel about their work. Just about on every issue.” And Franken devoted 29 pages of his next book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right(2003) to Wellstone and the media coverage that had painted his memorial service as a partisan political rally, rather than a remembrance of a cherished friend. Six months after the election, Franken certainly did not fail to note Coleman’s hurtful assessment of his predecessor: “To be very blunt-and God watch over Paul’s soul-I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone. And there was much to comment on in Minnesota, for Wellstone had died just 11 days before the election and his opponent, Norm Coleman, had not exactly stopped campaigning in the days after Wellstone’s death. By then, he had traded comedy for political and media commentary. The eulogies lasted three and a half hours.Īl Franken ’73, who was a friend of Wellstone and had raised money for him, was among the mourners. Twenty thousand people jammed into a Minneapolis arena to mourn. ![]() On October 25, 2002-just two weeks after the Senate vote-a plane carrying Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, two aides, and two pilots crashed in northern Minnesota. Wellstone voted against the war, but Cheney never had to retaliate. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.” And when the second Bush administration was rounding up votes for an invasion of Iraq, Wellstone said he heard from Vice President Dick Cheney: “If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. Bush’s reaction: “Who is that chickenshit?” An equal-opportunity offender, Wellstone was the only Democrat to vote against President Bill Clinton’s welfare-reform bill. senator from Minnesota, he voted against the Gulf War. Paul Wellstone didn’t mind taking unpopular positions.
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