Al Franken on Ted Cruz, Tom Coburn, and Why Democrats Can't Fit Their Message on a Bumper Sticker

Al Franken once told Ted Cruz, to his face, that his cruise was full of something unprintable. Cruz had nothing. Just nodded and walked away. That single exchange tells you almost everything about how Franken operated in the Senate: he understood that comedy, deployed correctly, is a form of power, and he was not above using it on people who absolutely deserved it.

This Live Talks Los Angeles conversation with Chelsea Handler is ostensibly a book tour stop, but it functions more like a decompression chamber for a liberal audience in the early months of the Trump administration. Franken is funny and warm and occasionally a little too pleased with his own stories, and Handler is a decent sparring partner who also, memorably, confuses a Hawaiian senator commuting home to his family with someone going on vacation. The audience corrects her. Loudly.

The Senate as Improv Stage

Franken’s central argument about his political career is that being a comedian was never the liability his critics assumed. He walked into the Senate having spent years heaping scorn on Republicans, and within two minutes Jim DeMint, the very conservative senator from South Carolina, walked up and asked how things were on the far left. Franken told him things were great, asked how things were on the nutcase right, and they were basically friends after that. The whole chamber, he suggests, ran on exactly this kind of calibrated irreverence.

The Tom Coburn story is the funniest proof of this. Coburn, the Oklahoma obstetrician-turned-senator known as Dr. No for his reflexive opposition to federal spending, genuinely did not know how jokes worked. So Franken took him to breakfast, explained the concept in real time, and asked whether you needed any formal education to be a doctor in Oklahoma. Coburn exploded. Franken said, calmly, that that was a joke. They had a nice breakfast. Coburn sent a note afterward saying he had fun.

I explained to him what jokes were. And what the proper reaction to a joke is.

The Ted Cruz bit is a different animal. Franken is careful to note that Cruz actually has a sense of humor, just not a very good one. He also says, without much apparent guilt, that he probably likes Cruz more than most of his Senate colleagues like Cruz, and that he still hates Ted Cruz. The rewrite of Amy Klobuchar’s Gridiron joke, which upgraded the central metaphor from a difficult cruise to a cruise full of something the transcript bleeps, is the kind of material that plays perfectly in a room full of people who already agree with you. Which, in Los Angeles, is all of them.

He’s a guy that microwaves fish in the lunchroom. He just doesn’t get along.

First You’ve Got to Have the Boots

The sharpest thing Franken does here is articulate why he’s a Democrat through his wife Franni’s family rather than through any policy platform. Her father, a decorated World War II veteran, died in a car crash when she was eighteen months old. Her mother raised five kids in Portland, Maine on Social Security survivor benefits, sometimes without heat, sometimes without enough food. All four daughters went to college on Pell Grants and scholarships. His mother-in-law got a GI loan, went to the University of Maine, became a teacher, had her loans forgiven for teaching low-income kids. Every member of that family made it into the middle class.

They tell you in this country to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and we all believe that. But first you got to have the boots. And the government gave them the boots. And that’s why I’m a Democrat.

It is a better argument for the social safety net than anything the Democratic Party has managed to put on a bumper sticker, which Franken would be the first to admit. His diagnosis of the party’s messaging problem is blunt: all their bumper stickers end with continued on next bumper sticker. The policy is sound. The pitch is a mess.

He makes the healthcare case through the same lens, describing the American system before the ACA as a tiered arrangement where your care depended entirely on your bracket. Medicare meant you were in the Canadian system. The VA meant the British model. Employer insurance meant German-style coverage. No insurance meant the Cambodian system. The whole point of the ACA, in his framing, was to move people out of that last category. It is a cleaner explanation than most elected officials manage, which raises the question of why Democrats don’t just let Franken write all their talking points. The answer, probably, is that it still ends up longer than a bumper sticker.

The Graduation in Willmar

The longest answer of the night, and the one that lands hardest, is about a high school commencement in Willmar, Minnesota, the largest turkey-producing county in the largest turkey-producing state. Franken invited himself to introduce Muna Abdullahi, a Somali-American student he’d known since she was a Senate page, who had been chosen as class speaker. The class was 60 percent white Scandinavian and German kids, 20 percent Latino, and a meaningful Somali population. The valedictorian was born in Ecuador. The homecoming queen, the following year, was Muna’s sister.

When Franken tells the French ambassador this story, the ambassador explains that most French people consider a Frenchman someone who can trace their family back centuries to a specific village. Franken’s response is that in Willmar, Minnesota, they just elect them homecoming queen. It is the most effective thing he says all night, and it’s not even close.

In the United States everybody here is an immigrant or from immigrants, everybody. Unless you’re an American Indian, and you have a right to be pissed off if you are.

Handler asks at one point whether Franken is hopeful, noting the desperation she sees in his eyes. He says he is. He points to Willmar, to his constituents, to the roundtables at rural Minnesota hospitals where people cry because Medicaid covers their mother’s home health care and they don’t know what they’ll do if it doesn’t. He quotes Paul Wellstone on politics being about improving people’s lives, not winning for its own sake. It sounds like something you’d put on a poster. Coming from Franken, in this room, at this moment, it doesn’t feel like a poster. It feels like the whole point.