FEISTY, FUNNY AL FRANKEN IS GETTING A SERIOUS LOOK
Memoir combines humor, barbed criticism
@susanpage USA TODAY WASHINGTON For Al Franken, it’s finally safe to be funny again just at a moment all the news around him has taken a decidedly unfunny turn.
The two-term Minnesota senator and one-time Saturday Night Live comedian is emerging as one of the fiercest challengers of President Trump and his team, and as a rising star in a Democratic Party eager for political combat. Albeit one who uses humor as his sword.
Near the end of a freewheeling memoir being published by Twelve next week (sarcastically) titled Al Franken: Giant of the Senate, he writes that there is “a decent chance” Trump will still be president by the time readers are perusing it.
Seriously: Does he think the president will serve the full four years?
Franken said it was “still too early” to make a judgment about whether Trump’s actions could amount to obstruction of justice or other impeachable offenses. In a follow-up interview Tuesday, he noted a Washington Post report that the president had asked two top intelligence officials to push back against the FBI investigation into possible collusion by his campaign.
“It’s feels like it’s accelerating, and we’re at a point there’s a lot of there there,” he said. “There’s things that are ... certainly improper communications approaching stuff that may be a crime.”
Perhaps it’s only right that the comedian-turned-senator would become an especially effective burr in the side of the reality-TV-star-turned-president.
He ousted an incumbent Republican senator, Norm Coleman, after a bitter eight-month recount battle that ended in an historic squeaker. When he was sworn in, in 2009, Franken decided to demonstrate that he was going to be a serious legislator, focused on his home state.
“You have to understand that I like Ted Cruz probably more than my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz.”
Behind the scenes, he tried to cultivate friendships, including with conservative Republican senators who wouldn’t be among his natural allies.
While the book provides a glimpse at some surprising friendships across ideological lines, there are no kind words for Ted Cruz. The Texas senator gets an entire chapter of his own that describes him as “singularly dishonest” and “exceptionally smarmy.” (Cruz’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Bashing Cruz in the book isn’t surprising. Criticizing Barack Obama is.
During Franken’s Senate campaign, former president Bill Clinton and then-senator Hillary Clinton appeared at rallies to help him get over the top. “But one person who had no interest in providing that help was Barack Obama,” Franken writes. (Obama spokesman Eric Schultz declined to comment.)
Franken celebrated his 66th birthday Sunday. His relish for debate and his full-throated liberalism is a good fit with the rising anti-Trump energy among Democrats on the left. His name has landed on the early, speculative lists of prospects for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020.
He dismisses that question in a way that doesn’t preclude the possibility. The 2020 campaign? “Look, that’s a long way away.”