The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Randall Beach: Al Franken’s back — down but not out
The last time Al Franken appeared in New Haven, at the Shubert Theater in August 2017, he was a popular Minnesota U.S. senator and a rising star in the Democratic Party whose name was often raised as a possible presidential candidate in 2020.
But as Frank Sinatra sang in “That’s Life,” you can be “riding high in April” but “shot down in May.”
Franken’s downfall came a few months after that Shubert show. As the #MeToo movement gained steam, he was accused by a woman of forcibly kissing her during a 2006 USO tour; she released a photo from that trip showing him mock-groping her breasts on a plane while she slept. Then three other women said he had had grabbed their backsides while posing for photos.
Franken apologized, saying he was “embarrassed and ashamed of some of what has come out.” But the outcry against him mounted, including among some of his liberal colleagues in the Senate. In December 2017 he resigned. Since then, some of those senators have said they acted too hastily in throwing him under the bus.
Well, now he has a podcast and is on a national speaking tour. Last Thursday night he came to the Col
lege Street Music Hall in New Haven, where a large crowd of middle-aged liberal Democrats who clearly are worried about our future greeted him with a thunderous ovation.
Instead of calling out for him to run for president, his followers asked him to run again for the U.S. Senate. He seemed pleased and flattered, but made no commitment.
Franken is something of a cult hero. When he came on stage, someone yelled “Love you!” Franken looked out into the crowd and said, “Oh geez — love YOU.”
Franken, who in a former life was a stand-up comedian and a staff writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live,” opened with some timely material: “I have some bad news. We’re all under quarantine! One of the ushers has a cough.”
“Hopefully this won’t be our last public event,” he added. “But in case it is, I’ll try to make it memorable.”
Actually it could have been more memorable than it turned out. For the following 90 minutes, Franken told some funny stories about his years in the Senate, sprinkled with his thoughts on the current political scene and his loathing of President Trump. But it was odd, that during a week which saw a historic resurgence by former Vice President Joe Biden Jr. in the presidential race, Franken never mentioned his name. For a comedian who cut his teeth on topical satire, this was a big missed opportunity.
Nor did Franken say anything about the controversial scandal that brought a halt to his political rise. It would have been a brave thing to address this three years later; he didn’t do it.
Franken also trotted out some of the same material he used on his last tour and that was in his book published in 2017, “Al Franken: Giant of the Senate.” (The title was satirical.) Is Franken winging it? Is he depressed about what befell him? It’s hard to know. But having seen his Shubert show, I felt this time around he had lost some of his pizzazz.
Nevertheless, the crowd seemed to be enjoying most of his show, except when he got
rather lost in the weeds of U.S. Senate political battles. His audience doubtless would have preferred hearing backstage stories from his 15 years at “Saturday Night Live”
( John Belushi! Gilda Radner!) rather than tales from the Senate cloakroom (Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas). “I’ll be happy to tell you about all the drugs I did at ‘SNL,’” he said. But he never got into it.
This was his Ted Cruz story: “After Sandy Hook, a bill to ban assault weapons was introduced in the Senate. And Ted Cruz said to me: ‘Anybody who’s for the assault weapons ban is engaged in sophistry.’ I said, ‘Ted, how am I engaged in sophistry?’ He told me: ‘(Bill) Clinton’s Justice Department in 1996 did a report saying it doesn’t
work.’ I told him he was wrong and he told me to go re-read the report. I did that and it showed gun deaths went down 6 percent but there wasn’t enough data. I took it back to Cruz and said, ‘Ted, yesterday, you told me I was engaged in sophistry.’ He said, ‘No I didn’t!’ and walked away. Can you (expletive) believe it?”
Franken used another expletive to describe Trump and his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. “When you are the president and faced with a worldwide crisis, the number one asset you rely on is your credibility. He tells us, ‘Everybody, the vaccine will be here soon’ and ‘You can go to work.’ That’s his ‘hunch.’”
“We have to beat him!” Franken said as the crowd applauded. “We have to turn
to the task at hand of defeating this sick, cruel, corrupt psychopath. That’s just my opinion. I’m sure he has a pleasant family somewhere.”
How to defeat Trump in November? Franken said the Democrats need to stop arguing over detailed policy proposals for health care reform (“Medicare for all”) and present the solution in just nine words: “You can do single payer without abolishing private insurance.” Franken noted this is how every country that has a single payer system does it.
Franken noted Republicans are trying to overturn Obamacare, which would result in “23 million people getting kicked off their coverage. If we all run on that message, we will win this election. We can then start to make things better for people.”
During the question-andanswer segment of the show, which gave Franken the chance to pick out the written queries he liked, he noted several people wrote: “Please run for the Senate again.” There followed the inevitable applause.
He enjoyed answering this one: “What did you think of Rush Limbaugh getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom?” Franken noted he wrote a book entitled “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.” He added, “If it wasn’t for Rush and Newt Gingrich, Trump wouldn’t be president. They made it possible for someone that cruel and awful and lying to become president. I think this medal was his reward.”
Franken listed some of the other people who have received that medal. They included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa. “I think Trump is kicking himself because he didn’t give this to (convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein.”
Franken appeared to be ending the evening when he said mournfully: “If Trump gets reelected, this might be the last election we ever have.” But then a woman shouted from the audience: “End on a happy note!”
Franken paused, then said: “I think we’re gonna do it. But we need everyone to do it.” He also told us he has four grandchildren.
“This country is better than you think,” he told us. “That’s something I can tell you.” He launched into a story about a young Somali woman from Minnesota who had worked in his Senate office, then went on to be the class speaker at her high school commencement. He recalled watching her walk into the ceremony holding hands with a classmate named Carlson, of Scandinavian heritage.
Franken said later that year he saw her at the University of Minnesota. “She told me her sister was elected homecoming queen.”
“Trump just doesn’t understand who we are,” Franken said. “We’re all immigrants.”
Franken seemed to choke up as he told us: “Here, we elect that girl the homecoming queen!”
And there, folks, was the happy note that ended the evening.