Someone asked for an Amazon link for Al Franken's book so they could order it and I could get my teensy commission. Here it is and thank you very much. I haven't had time to finish it yet but I'm enjoying what I've read. It is not one of those books that even politicians I support usually write which are (a) obviously ghosted and (b) all about how we're right and they're wrong and you just have to keep supporting me and supporting me and we'll save the world.
Franken is an interesting fellow and I've thought that since a time when no one would ever have believed he'd amount to anything, let alone a U.S. Senator. When I was doing variety shows for NBC, he was on Saturday Night Live. One rarely heard his name in the halls here on the opposite coast without the word "asshole" somewhere in the same sentence and often the word "smug" preceding it. He was anything but a politician, alienating people left and right, seeming to enjoy when they thought he was rude and insensitive, just so long as his career was advancing.
At the time, if you had said that guy would wind up in the senate, it would have been a joke. In fact, it would have been the exact same joke as at the end of National Lampoon's Animal House where they say that Bluto — the John Belushi character — wound up as a United States Senator.
At some point though, Franken seems to have realized that he was on a dead-end path. His partner in writing and performing was a funny but self-destructive guy named Tom Davis, and Franken finally separated from him and explored new career possibilities. How he wound up as the junior senator from the great state of Minnesota is what this book is about and it's also kind of about how he changed as a human being. I'm up to the part where he begins running for the senate and his opponents are taking many of his old jokes and citing them as examples of serious (and insane) policy proposals that he had supposedly once made. It would be like if someone claimed that Robert Klein had a physical affliction that made him actually unable to stop his leg.
I've met Franken twice. One time was when my old friend Aaron Barnhart was in town. Aaron was the TV critic at the Kansas City Star and one Friday evening, we went over to CBS Television City on a two-part mission. The second part was to be in the audience for that evening's telecast of Dennis Miller Live. The first was to visit the offices of The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder prior to that show's taping for the evening. Aaron wanted to meet one of his heroes, TV critic Tom Shales, who was a guest that evening.
I was not a fan of Mr. Shales and Aaron kind of wanted to be alone with him so he went into Shales' dressing room while I waited in an outer office with the other guest for that evening. It was Al Franken and while we chatted a bit, he was mostly talking with the guest host for that evening, a guy named Jon Stewart. I said darn near nothing as the two of them conversed but I remember thinking I was in the presence of two of the smartest people I'd ever met. I also remember thinking, "This is the guy everyone kept saying was a smug asshole?" Not that evening, he wasn't. He still hadn't thought of running for public office then but when he did, I was probably less surprised than most people.
The other time I met him was in 2003 and I wrote about it in this post. Reading it now, I can't understand why I left out part of the story. I wrote about how at the public appearance, Franken was verbally assaulted by one questioner and he offered to talk one-on-one with the guy after the event. He had a lot of copies of his book to sign before he could get around to that.
I was there with my good friend, the late Earl Kress, and with my best friend, the late Carolyn Kelly. My, how things have changed since 2003.
We got signed books from Franken and talked with him as long as we could — a matter of seconds because there was a long line of others waiting for autographed books. The guy who'd gotten so outraged at Franken was at the end of the line, still fuming and eager for his face-to-face with the not-yet-Senator. I sensed a chance of trouble and suggested to Earl and a couple of friends that we stick around. It did not seem impossible that the outraged guy might get physical and I thought that might be less likely if Franken was flanked by a bunch of us. Also, I kind of wanted to see what was going to happen.
The outraged guy was upset that something in Franken's new book — the one he was signing, the one about how some right-wing pundits fibbed and got facts wrong — was factually incorrect. I don't recall what the supposed error (or "lie") was but it seemed pretty trivial to me…one of those arguable discrepancies that you could write off to one awkward choice of words. Whatever it was, Franken gave the man way more time and respect than I thought was warranted. As it turned out, that was about all this person really wanted — to have someone actually listen to him and not dismiss him as a kook, which would have been a natural dismissal, given the way he was acting.
I am paraphrasing from memory here but as I recall, Franken said something like this: "I don't think you're right and I don't think this is a big or even a medium-sized issue but I'll look into it." And then he said — and I think his confronter liked this because he knew Franken was being candid with him — "The honest truth here is that even if I did get it wrong, there's not much I can do to correct it. I'll mention it in some public appearances if I can squeeze it in but the way our press works, corrections almost never catch up with the original error. And since no one else, including the people it's about have ever complained about the alleged error, I really don't think anyone's going to care. But you care about it obviously because you came out here and I care about it because I hate making errors…so I'll look into it and I thank you for bringing it to my attention."
If that doesn't sound like it would have satisfied a guy who a half-hour earlier was screaming and frothing, maybe I'm not recalling it with enough precision or maybe you just had to hear Franken saying it. He looked the man right in the eye and gave him all the time the guy wanted to state his case and then respond, and it did satisfy him and I was really impressed.
We had not told Franken we'd hung around as contingency bodyguards but he'd figured it out. Once the fellow was gone, he turned to us and said, "Thanks for sticking around to protect me, guys, but as you can see, I didn't need it. Besides, I used to wrestle in college. I think I could have taken him." The man had eight inches and at least a hundred pounds on Franken so we all laughed.
I've liked him ever since that moment…or maybe it would be better to say I've liked what he's turned into. I'm eager to finish the book and see how he did it.
I know there are people reading this who think that Senator Al Franken is no less the smug asshole than the putz talking about his very own decade on Saturday Night Live. If I wanted to see Donald Trump's agenda succeed, I might think so, too. Nevertheless, I'm really, really impressed with people who find it within themselves to change for the better. I think Al Franken did and that's why — never mind the political stuff — I'm enjoying reading how he did it.