The New Republic: Franken Sense

The very serious senator from Minnesota.

• Jeffrey Rosen

  

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Legal Affairs Editor

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  • Pragmatism Strikes Back
  • Franken Sense
  • Privacy Strikes Back
• November 10, 2010 | 2:11 pm

In July 2009, after a cliff-hanger of an election and an ugly court battle over the results, Al Franken finally arrived in the United States Senate. Eager to lay the groundwork for legislative accomplishments, the author of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot looked for common ground with his new GOP colleagues. In the case of Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, that common ground was music. In addition to his senatorial career, Hatch is a prolific songwriter—he has written odes to John McCain, America, Hanukkah, and Princess Diana, among other subjects—and so Franken approached him and asked to hear a few tunes. Hatch played a recording of a song called “Headed Home,” which was written before his close friend Ted Kennedy died and had a metaphor about sailing into the ocean. “It was obvious what that was about, and I began to tear up a bit,” Franken told me. Then Hatch played a sad song in which an American wife entreats her husband, a soldier in Kandahar, to “Come Home.” “The waterworks started,” Franken recalled. “I’m a crier.”
To lighten the mood, Hatch broke out a country music number called “Are You Lonely Here With Me?” The song made Franken laugh, and he confessed to Hatch that he had written a humorous country song of his own, “We Stayed Together for the Kids.” He proceeded to sing it for me in an exaggerated Nashville twang:

We stayed together for the kids
And this is what we thought we had to do
But now the kids are up and gone
And there’s just me and there’s just you

Franken explained to Hatch that he wanted the song to conclude with the couple deciding to stay together, despite their many years of bickering. But he needed a bridge to reach this happy ending, and Hatch suggested they write one together. A few weeks later, the pair spent more than an hour brainstorming lyrics and discarding lines they thought weren’t sufficiently funny. Finally, they came up with this: “I’m amazed the kids turned out ok/I’m amazed with you today.” Franken explained, “The verses are all about how they couldn’t stand each other, basically, and all the stuff that went on between them, and then the last verse is sort of like, ‘You got better with age, you grew up a little too/I’ll share my empty nest with you.’ It turns out they’re glad they stayed together.”
I asked Franken the obvious question: Was the song a metaphor? Was he going out of his way to work with Republicans for the good of the kids—that is, the American people? Franken cackled. “I don’t know if I’d go that far—I actually really enjoy a lot of my Republican colleagues,” he said. “And I try to get along with everyone. The Senate is like a small town with a hundred people in it. And each one can put a hold on you.” Warming to his metaphor, Franken grinned mischievously. “It’s a somewhat contentious small town ... and some members are sometimes trying to slow down what the town is doing when the town really needs to be moving. But what are you going to do? It’s obviously been a difficult time in certain respects, sometimes it is frustrating ... but you don’t take it out” on your colleagues.
When Franken launched his campaign for the Senate, it wasn’t obvious that the former comedian and Air America pundit would become a devotee of the rituals of senatorial comity. As an entertainer, Franken had mastered a combative political persona in which he tackled his ideological opponents head-on. Given the opportunity to interview George W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, he asked Bush whether he’d ever manufactured crystal meth. He famously got into a shouting match with Bill O’Reilly at a C-SPAN panel discussion, and, in another of his books, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, he recounted that he’d once called up National Review editor Rich Lowry and challenged him to a fight in a parking garage. When Franken arrived in Washington, many expected him to be a bombastic, no-holds-barred partisan.
But Franken has self-consciously chosen a different model: the institutionalist who can achieve bipartisan consensus but also successfully champion liberal legislation. During his brief time in office, Franken has emerged as a throwback to the successful progressives of a distant era when senators knew what they were talking about and spent long hours working on worthy policy proposals to make the lives of their constituents better. As unlikely as it may appear, at a time when it seems as if every politician wants to be a celebrity, Franken has used his celebrity to become a serious senator.