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Franken earnest (with jokes)

By BILL ADAIR
Published November 6, 2005

Al Franken wants to be taken seriously. Some day, he'd like to be Senator Franken.

The comedian/actor/political commentator has a new book, The Truth (with jokes), that is more serious than his previous works. It's still got plenty of humor - he vows that, if elected, he will join Republican Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill to prohibit marriages between men and dogs - but his analysis of the 2004 election and the Bush White House establishes him as a legitimate Democratic voice.

Franken is laying the groundwork to run for the Senate from Minnesota in a few years. He plans to move there next year, continue his talk show on the Air America radio network and build a political base.

He was interviewed by telephone last week from Seattle, where he was promoting the book:

Why "with jokes"?

What I do in my books is what I call "nutritious candy." The nutrition is the truth part,and the jokes are the candy part. It gets people to read stuff they might not otherwise.

On the cover, you look very dour. Why so serious?

We live in a little bit more serious time than the last time I wrote. The truth is a little dour right now.

The last book, I wrote a lot about the myth of a liberal mainstream media but said there is a right-wing media. I did a lot about O'Reilly and Hannity and Coulter. It was a lot of low-hanging fruit, stuff that is easy to make fun of.

This book is an argument about how this president won the election and how they claimed it was a mandate that they didn't have. They won by the lowest margin of any incumbent president ever.

Last week was not a good week for the Bush presidency. Did that make it a good week for you?

You are not supposed to have Schadenfreude (glee at another's misfortune) over Scooter Libby. But it is legitimate to feel good about it, because this is a guy who was trying to smear Joe Wilson and to do it, outed his wife, who is an undercover CIA agent.

George H.W. Bush, the president's father, was the director of the CIA and said that outing a CIA agent is treason. I think Libby is lucky that he is not going to be executed. I don't think he should be executed, but I think he is lucky that he won't be.

What did you think of the Harriet Miers episode?

I think she put it best in her letter when she said that she felt "her total lack of qualifications had become a distraction."

I didn't remember that exact phrase in her letter.

(Laughs) I think I got it right. I may be paraphrasing. "My total lack of qualifications has become a distraction." Or maybe it was ""complete lack . . ."

Do you think the Democrats are getting better?

No! (Laughs) That's why, in my book, I talk about how we will get our act together.

What do you think the Democrats should do?

I think we need to come up with some things that we stand for and show that we deserve to lead. I think the last time we led, we did it pretty damn well. We had eight years of expansion, and we did things like appoint people to FEMA who are actually not cronies, but were qualified.

We've got to ...be for a certain set of things - universal health care, an Apollo project for renewable energy - and I think we have to talk about things like global warming, and I think we have to talk about things like values.

We've got to not let them (the Republicans) hijack the idea of values. The last I checked, if you took out every passage in the New Testament where Jesus mentions helping the poor, if you cut all of those out, you'd have the perfect container to smuggle Rush Limbaugh's drugs.

You spend much of the book documenting how the Bush campaign defeated John Kerry using fears of terrorism, the attacks on his war record and distortions about gay marriage - which were all factors in the outcome. But shouldn't you be tougher on Kerry? He was not a very good candidate.

In some ways, I think I make some glancing references to those things in the book. I think he could have been a better candidate. And I do think he could have been a better candidate by responding to the smears faster and harder and pivoting on them.

You devote a chapter to the Terri Schiavo case, sarcastically using the phrase that it was "a great political issue." Why do you think the conservatives miscalculated on the Schiavo controversy?

I think the president felt that he owed the religious conservative right for helping him win the election. So I think when Schiavo happened, the nut-case religious right, led by Tom DeLay, decided to open Congress on the weekend and make this a huge issue.

(President) Bush flew back to sign that bill. It took him three days to respond to the tsunami, but he immediately flew back to sign that bill, because they thought it was a great political issue.

Your friend Norman Ornstein said you are pretty serious about running for the Senate. Why do you want to?

I'm seriously considering it, because I don't want to sit on the sidelines and just criticize. I would like to get in there and help change things.

Will people take you seriously - a guy who played Stuart Smalley (a character on Saturday Night Live) and has written books that make up a lot of stuff?

(Referring to Arnold Schwarzenegger) I'm sorry I've never killed anyone in my movies. I apologize for not being a guy who came back from the future and mowed down people. (Laughs)

Do you think you have more gravitas than Arnold?

That would be for the people of Minnesota to decide.

But, yes.

So your plan is to run in 2008?

I'm not planning to run; I'm thinking about it. I'm moving back to Minnesota, we think in January. I'm going to become politically active there and do as much as I can for progressive candidates in Minnesota and in the region - and across the country. I think it's important that we take back one of the houses of Congress in 2006.

What Republican presidential contender do you fear the most?

McCain. But I don't think they'll nominate him. I think the conservatives, the people that vote in the primaries and show up at the caucuses, don't like McCain. He attacked the Christian right in a way they didn't like. He didn't win any primaries or caucuses in which there weren't independents.

[Last modified November 4, 2005, 19:26:02]