Al Frankin for Senator?

From AOL news, so you may need to be a member.

I wasn’t sure which forum to put this in. I decided I wanted rational discussion on whether he should, will or has any chance of winning the Minnesota seat— but I put in in GD anyway.

Why wouldn’t he run in New York, where he currently resides? I guess he figures if The Body can win as Governor, then a humorist has a shot as a Senator. I, for one, would love to see him in the Senate. If only for the great books he could write about his experiences there.

I don’t know; he seems to be one of the more honest political humorists. Can he lie as well as the people he criticizes? If not, then he’ll never get elected.

His opponent would be Norm Coleman who is not particuarly well-liked in Minnesota. He only got into office because of a plane crash and his sycophantic support for Bush has been viewed rather distastefully by many in the state, especially in the metro area.

IOW, Coleman is not an especially strong candidate for reelection so he could be vulnerable to a celebrity candidacy. Humor can be very effective in political campaigns as well and a few well-placed zingers from Franken in a debate could yield good results.

Personally, I would vote for Franken over Coleman, but then I would vote for Pee Wee Herman over Coleman.

You know why Pee-Wee Herman didn’t hire a lawyer when he got busted? He figured he could get himself off.

Well, that would be Hillary’s seat, wouldn’t it? She may be running for president at that time, but it still wouldn’t be polite for him spectulate at this time about running to take her place. Minnesota is very liberal and as Diogenes the Cynic points out there is nothing wrong with him speculating about running for that seat. If Hillary does run, there would be no problem for him to then decide that it was better to run in New York.

He will not be running in Mississippi, so I’ll just say I don’t have a dog in this race. :wink:

Al Franken was born and raised in Minnesota. He wouldn’t be a carpetbagger.

Does he recognize cream of mushroom soup as a major food group?

Has he ever misidentified “hot dish” as “casserole”?

If someone steps on his foot, does he apologize?

If he shouts “Get down!” is he suggesting that you aren’t dressed warmly enough?

Is he nice?

Franken also remains close (or so he says) with Paul Wellstone’s family, so I imagine there might be some emotional drive as well, especially given how the Republicans distorted the Wellstone memorial service last year.

Still, I’m not sure if I’d want to see Franken in office. I think he’d be more effective as an outsider, poking holes at the Powers That Be and keeping them in check. I’d rather see him as a nationwide political pundit than as a politician.

And Coleman is a New Yorker (born and raised, though lived in Minnesota for years) so its really only fair…

Several years ago the western and most Republican part of the Great State of Iowa (truly a flat place in the middle of nowhere) elected the guy who played Gopher on Love Boat to Congress. A born and bred Iowan he had gotten the hell out of here and gone off to California to make his fortune. When he reappeared in his middle age for the sole and explicit purpose of running for Congress as a moderate Republican he was abused from the right and the left as a celebrity candidate and as (horror!) not a real Iowan.

He won two or three terms and did a pretty good job. He then made the mistake of running against the then incumbent governor (a no tax, no change, every thing is OK ideological reactionary) in the GOP primary. He narrowly lost and went back to California.

Now, surely Al Franken is better suited and more knowledgeable than was Fred Grandy. He is just as much a Gopher as Grandy was a Hawkeye. His obvious attachment to the Wellstones and that branch of the Democratic Party should help. The incumbent’s reputation as a carpetbagger with an umbilical connection to the present national administration would be some help with the well educated, rational, Northern European and conventional and moderate Christian majority in Minnesota. (Yea, I know, but Jessie was an aberration that went stale in very short order.) Beyond that, just think of all the pleasure Senator Franken would give elucidator, and the hysterics it would generate among the likes of Tom Delay and Oran Hatch. You think Barny Franks drive them nuts? Just wait till Franken starts puncturing gas bags.

It’d be a nasty race. Based on what I’ve read of the early years of SNL, his opponents would have plenty of smear ammo.

Are you insinuating that Hillary is a carpetbagger? Them’s fightin’ words!

And what the hell do you have against Gary Coleman? He made a fine candidate for governor in CA.:slight_smile:

There’s nothing Al Franken could have done that Jesse Ventura didn’t do more of. Minnesotans don’t much care about that stuff. in fact, bringing up a guy’s past might be seen as kind of intemperate and not very nice.

Dio, our fellow dopers have led sheltered lives, for the most part. I don’t think they can be safely exposed to the brutal realities of MN politics. Might be best to draw a discreet veil…

John Mace, having lived in the Twin Cities for two years while Norm Coleman was mayor of St. Paul, I can definitely say that Gary would have been an improvement.

There won’t be a Senate election in New York five years from now. Schumer should be running for election in 2004, and Hillary in 2006.

… In case that seems irrelevant - which I guess it is, I was just thinking about the “five years” bit - Franken is clearly a Democrat, and as such I don’t think he’d want to take on either of NY’s Democratic Senate incumbents.

Some problems with Franken’s running…

  1. While Coleman was raised outside the state, the information I’ve seen on the Web implies that he’s lived in Minnesota since 1976. Franken, on the other hand, hasn’t lived full-time in Minnesota since (The late 1960? The early 1970?).

  2. Coleman’s not nearly as weak as, say, Rod Grams was. He was twice elected Mayor of St. Paul (once as a Republican), once to the US Senate, and (odds are) he would have been elected Governor in 1998 if Ventura hadn’t run.

  3. This is something that I honestly don’t know: How conservative is Coleman? Deeply conservative Reps have no chance statewide consistenly in Minnesota, but moderate Reps do fairly well (Think of Durenberg, or Carlson).

  4. Would the Minnesota Democratic Party nominate him? They still control the Senate and the Attorney Generalship of Minnesota, so they (presumably) would have a strong “bench” for statewide candidates.

1.) True, but Franken has maintained close ties with the state and visits often. He is frequently a guest on local radio shows in the Twin Cities, has been spotted at State Fairs and the like, and would probably not be seen as someone who was returning to the state simply to exploit it for personal reasons.

2.) Coleman’s fortunes are largely going to be tied to those of GWB. Coleman was handpicked by the White House to run against Wellstone (the original GOP frontrunner, Tim Pawlenty, received a personal phone call from Dick Cheney ordering him to vacate the race because Coleman was the guy that Bush wanted). Since getting in, Coleman has been welded at the hip to Bush’s agenda. The one issue with which Coleman claimed to disagree with Bush on during his Senate race was drilling in Alaska. That was a safe political stance in green-friendly Minnesota and it gave him an issue which he could brandish as proof that he wasn’t just GeeDubya’s bitch. Now Coleman has “reconsidered” his stance on drilling in Alaska and has decided to support it. That won’t help him. In a weird way, Minnesotans seem to prefer a guy who’ll keep his word, and stick to a position, even if they disagree with it, than a guy who’ll change with the weather. Paul Wellstone is a perfect example of a guy who was respected for his philosophical integrity and consistency even by those who thought he was just this side of Vladmir Lenin.

In any case, Coleman has yet to really define himself as anything other than a Bush crony. If the war in Iraq continues to go south and Coleman continues to support it there will be a backlash. There is a very conservative base in the rural parts of the state, part but the metro voters are not happy about Iraq right now.

3.) That depends on what day it is. Coleman started off as a Democrat when he first ran for mayor of St. Paul. He switched to the GOP for his gubernatorial run because Skip Humphrey had the DFL nomination sewn up. Coleman ran for Guv as a moderate Republican but now has moderated more to the right in order to stay in lockstep with the White House. I think it would probably be safe to define him as a neo-con at the moment but Coleman really has no sincere ideology and will simply project whatever image will serve him politically at any given time.

4.) This is actually a pretty good question and the DFL may not be that enthusiastic about a “Hollywood” celeb usurping their party. They may go along with it if they are truly desperate to get rid of Coleman and any preliminary research shows that Franken would have a shot at unseating him. Truthfully, getting the DFL’s support may be Franken’s biggest hurdle were he to choose to pursue Coleman’s Senate seat.

A friend of mine (deeply involved in Minnesota politics) describes Coleman this way: Look - A Republican, a Democrat, a Christian, a Jew, an Insider, an Outsider, A Conservative, A Liberal, a Midwesterner, an East Coaster…Norm Coleman … all things to all people.

Minnesota is getting a lot more conservative. But there are still a lot of liberals and they are getting angry.

Franken may live in New York, but once a Minnesotan, always a Minnesotan - especially if you show up at the State Fair.

(On the topic of the Minnesota DFL, oh, God - can anyone screw up their own party more? Let’s run candidates because its their turn rather than because they are good. Or because they meet some quota for being the right gender and/or race. Let’s piss off anyone mildly conservative - while simultanously driving the left to the Greens).