Al Franken: Failing Forward

Here in the frigid, overtaxed state of Minnesota, we know one thing about Al Franken… he’s persistent. I’d even venture to say he won’t be waiting for The One to finish out his term and run for a second as President. Franken will go for the gold in 2012. Even if Obama manages to get the Democratic votes for the nomination the next go ’round, Al’s going to take it anyway. And if you don’t believe me, just look at his history.

Al Franken persisted as a comedian for decades. Hell, they still refer to him as a “comedian” in the papers. He spent years writing, performing and radio-show hosting as a comedian. The guy managed to do this despite the handicap of a complete and total lack of comedic ability (and, for the record, ideology doesn’t trump comedy for me… I’m a huge Carlin fan and cite Kevin Smith as my reason for giving this business a go). Franken’s career has led me to imagine a skinny, 90lb kid with asthma who wants to be a linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He has no skill, no size, no talent. But he makes it – and though he’s never made a tackle, he is widely credited as one of the NFL’s all-time greats. A hero! But Franken is a hack.

A hack, you say? How dare you, Wilson! I loved that Stuart Smalley movie! Asshole.

Yeah, I’m an asshole. But I’m also right about Franken. It seems the man has failed forward in every stage of his life.

Franken’s supporters make a big deal of his degree from Harvard. And while an Ivy League education will take you a long way, as it certainly did for Franken, President Obama, all the writers at “The Simpsons” and President Bush (among thousands of other household names), it’s usually accompanied by some direction for the graduate’s life. Franken’s degree is in General Studies. It may as well be in Pong or some such shit. Because when I went to school at Saint Cloud State University, a school that is as much a polar opposite to Harvard as anything, people majoring in General Studies were usually the passed-out bastards I had to step over to get into one of the party houses before engaging in some of the college world’s most heralded underage consumption.

After that, Franken started working for SNL as a writer. He created one memorable character, Stuart Smalley (who was, admittedly, funny for about 4 minutes and seventeen seconds), before being shit-canned for doing a monologue about the president of NBC. Okay, there was no official firing … in the same way that Bush didn’t “fire” Brownie after Katrina, but Lorne Michaels left at the end of that season, and without a skirt to hide behind, so did Franken.

He popped up on SNL again after the smoke cleared but didn’t get to anchor the show’s Weekend Update, so he quit. I can hear that monotone, boring voice: “Uh, well, I guess I, maybe you should let me host Weekend Update. After all, it’s the “decade of Al Franken.” No shit, he actually called the 80’s the “decade of Al Franken,” even though unbridled capitalism, patriotism and Reaganism (the antithesis of Franken’s ideology) were very much in vogue and propelled the nation to greatness after Carter’s malaise. But he quit. Or was fired. Or whatever.

He wrote some books including “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” in between writing screenplays like “Stuart Smalley Saves His Family.” Now, this is the only spot where Franken supporters are going to be able to reasonably argue with me. Those books were successful. And they are the source material that formed the public persona that we Minnesotans rejected in the 2008 election. Oops. I mean, these are the books that gave the super-crazy left the idea that Al Franken would be a decent Senator from the Great Tundra of Minnesota. These voters clearly didn’t consider the movies Franken wrote. But I’ll give them the whole “He was on the NYT Bestseller List” thing.

Franken, an astute Harvard grad, figured out that a whole bunch of people listen to, and therefore there’s a big market in get information from talk radio, so he began hosting a really, really, really, really, really terrible show on something called Air America, which was and continues to be a failure because it’s boring to listen to liberals for the sake of listening to liberals. And because liberal listeners aren’t capitalistic by nature and therefore don’t buy shit that’s advertised, advertisers don’t like this. But Fuckin’ A, you can send a donation. Or you can just take money from the Boys and Girls Club of America.

Franken’s radio show was an abysmal failure. But that didn’t stop him. No, that guy is persistent. Most Harvard graduates are. So to get out of his contract to serve the nation and the people of Minnesota, Franken moved back to the state where he hadn’t lived since he got into showbiz and was a coastal dude because that’s where all the action is his childhood, and announced that he was running against Senator Norm Coleman in 2008.

If you’ll forgive me a little tangent, I’d like to point out that Coleman is no conservative, nor, as I prefer, a libertarian. He’s against drilling in ANWR, among other things, and is generally considered a centrist among both Republicans and Democrats. In full disclosure, I’ve met Norm a couple of times and think he’s a nice guy. Not a raving libertarian like me, but a nice guy. The same could probably be said of Obama. Not my cup of tea politically, and may run the country into the earth, but seems like a nice enough fellow. The point is, the liberals who hate Coleman so much are kind of Windmilling themselves (a term coined by Joe Soucheray, referring to the desire for eco-friendly windmills by environmentalists, who then decry said windmills because of their aesthetics). Coleman’s not a millionaire, he used to be a Democrat, and his ideology is pretty much right down the middle… all things Minnesota Dems have been screaming for.

Back to Franken. He announced he was leaving the radio to run for Senate, and people said, “Really, AL? You’re a comedian. You don’t have any ideas. You haven’t really lived in Minnesota for decades.” Al shrugged and, as always, persisted. He ran and then lost the election. But that didn’t stop him. Franken knew a flawed manual recount was coming. And he quickly announced that we “still don’t know who won the election.” He was down by 215 votes.

After quite a bit of legal wrangling, wherein some votes were counted that shouldn’t have been, some votes were counted more than once, Lizard People got some undue media coverage and Minnesotans declared that they didn’t give a crap which guy was the next Senator, the state canvassing board announced that Franken had the numbers. Coleman’s 215-vote lead wasn’t enough, but now that Franken has 225, he says he’s won. And knowing that Minnesota’s judges are both soft and, in true Minnesota fashion, are opposed to confrontation, I don’t believe that Coleman will win his challenge. Franken will be the next Senator from California New York Minnesota.

I predict that Al Franken will be elected President of the United States of America in 2012. He’ll run, maybe even lose, but he’ll find a way to be called President. And maybe we need someone like Franken in the White House. After all, I think the President should be someone with real resolve. And Al Franken is perhaps the most persistent candidate we’ve ever seen. No failure, no matter how monumental, stops him. Now, if only he didn’t believe that government, in all its glorious ineptitude, is the answer to all our problems.