Doggone It, People Like Him: Al Franken Gets Serious About the Senate in Minnesota

The satirist tries to overcome his unconventional past by campaigning early and often — and by handing out heaps of cash. Can he extend the Democrats' majority in the Senate?

Jonathan Stein
Mother Jones

In the spacious living room of his Minneapolis town house, Al Franken is trying to explain why he's stopping himself from telling me a joke. For the last 18 months, he's gone to every spaghetti dinner, bean feed, and burger bash he could find, many in small conservative towns, to campaign for Minnesota Democrats, road test his new senatorial act, and raise more than $1 million for candidates nationwide. It's an early, aggressive strategy, but the jokes—the jokes are all anyone wants to talk about. When Franken delivered a long speech explaining his motivation to run, the press picked apart the one-liners. When a poll showed him doing well against the incumbent Republican, Norm Coleman, the state gop pointed to Franken's history of off-color jokes (many about the president's codpiece in the "Mission Accomplished" photo op). "I was discussing this with [fellow comedian Robert] Smigel," Franken says. "What Robert says is, 'Any other candidate who made jokes of this quality would be lauded. But with you, it's sort of like they want people to come away saying, God, he was great! I didn't laugh.'" He cracks up. Then, switching back to candidate mode, he goes on, "That's why I started early—because I want to get that out of the way."

The head start offers other advantages as well, like a sense of which jokes are too blue, and how to best smooth over Franken's notoriously prickly personality. The jokes, for now, can stay, so long as the edgy awkwardness that fuels so many comedians' humor doesn't come off as imperiousness. Because that doesn't play well in Minnesota, as Franken, who grew up there, undoubtedly knows.

But what does? Jesse Ventura's 1998 gubernatorial victory as an independent is only the best-known indicator of Minnesota's political volatility. Once reliably blue, the state swung right in the 1990s as conservative exurbanites began to outvote the union-dominated mining regions of the North. In 2002, after Democrats were maligned for turning a memorial service for beloved Senator Paul Wellstone into an overcharged political rally, Coleman was elected to the Senate, and the gop took control of the state House of Representatives by a wide margin. But recently, Minnesota Democrats, known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, or dfl, have been on the rebound. Now the political locus is in the southern part of the state, the kind of once solidly conservative, now war-weary region that helped hand Congress to the Democrats. In 2006 the 1st Congressional District, which had been represented by a conservative Republican for 12 years, elected a Democratic Iraq veteran.

Franken spends a lot of time in the 1st. One spring afternoon, he stands before some 50 retirees gathered at a coffee shop in the town of St. James (pop. 4,416). "Is there something you'd like me to know?" he begins. "Something I probably wouldn't know about?" A woman brings up the community's changing makeup; manufacturing plants have brought an influx of Hispanics. Franken cuts to the quick. "Is it a strain? Is it a good thing?"

(Continued here.)