Ranting On...Al Franken & "Winning the Right Way"

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN)

This morning, yet another chapter was written when it came to the conversation about former US Senator Al Franken, and the end to his congressional career.  We have detailed the story of Al Franken multiple times before on this blog, but for those unfamiliar, the former Minnesota senator resigned from the US Senate as of January 2, 2018, after allegations of improper touching and conduct with eight different women, including comedienne Leeann Tweeden.  Since then, many people, including Franken himself, have bemoaned his resignation from the US Senate, and this came to light once again this morning when investigative journalist Jane Mayer wrote an article for The New Yorker attempting to exonerate Franken, shaming some of the accusers (specifically Tweeden) and condemning Democrats for throwing Franken out rather than having him face an ethics hearing.

I could just let this go, and I kind of think I should (other than Bernie vs. Hillary, there's really no place scarier to go in the progressive politics section of the internet than discussing Al Franken), but I feel like there's a couple of things regarding this article that I didn't say the first times around, and I'm going to get them out, and then let this rest unless for some reason Franken decides to run for public office again.

For starters, Mayer's article is basically a Franken supporter's wet dream, but it doesn't even pretend to be unbiased.  It spends most of the first half bashing Tweeden, trying to discredit her based on her politics, as if it's impossible for a liberal man to harass a conservative woman (spoiler alert: it's not).  It doesn't try to discredit the other seven women, using anecdotes from people like Sarah Silverman to build up his character instead, something Democrats would crucify, say, an article for doing if they were discussing Roy Moore (imagine the eye rolls if Moore simply found random women to say that he never harassed them as proof he couldn't possibly have harassed the women who came forward against him).  It also talks about how Franken did have a history of inappropriate conduct with constituents, albeit in a way that some would find appropriate but others wouldn't (staff and even fellow Sen. Chris Murphy had warned him that he was too physical during photo ops).  And finally, it seems to not understand that Franken's intent when he inappropriately interacted with these women wasn't the problem-it was that he had no right to do so in the first place.  It should be clear to anyone that unwanted kissing or touching someone else's breasts or buttocks without permission is not acceptable, end of story.

I'm not going to change many minds here, I suspect.  People who adored Franken are going to consider Mayer's "repudiation" of attacks against him as a "much-deserved retribution," something they can attack Kirsten Gillibrand's Twitter account with with great aplomb.  But it's also clear in Mayer's article that she didn't really exonerate him on anything-she just made excuses for him.  Quite frankly, reading Mayer's article, it simply makes you think that Franken might have gotten away with his behavior if he'd behaved the same way that Ralph Northam or Jim Jordan or Duncan Hunter or Donald Trump did, not that what he did was right.  Claim he didn't do it, say "it's not fair!" at the top of his lungs, and sit on in public office, hoping that even as a damaged US Senator he'd still have some great sway and avoid a 2020 primary challenge.

That Franken didn't shows that he, even with these allegations, seems to have had some respect for his office, his ideals, and the people of Minnesota.  But it's also worth remembering that Al Franken resigning had consequences, and they were incredibly important.  Some will argue this fact, but it seemed relatively clear at the time that Franken's resignation was being driven in large part by the Alabama Senate race.  People, including Gillibrand and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, could tell that the Franken allegations were depriving US Attorney Doug Jones of an easy attack against Roy Moore, who had been accused of sexually assaulting several women, including two teenagers.  This wasn't remotely comparable to the worst of the allegations against Franken, but that didn't seem to matter.  President Trump, who had also been accused of worse than Franken, took easy potshots at him, and it was obvious that the Republicans were trying to frame attacks against Jones in the vein of "Democrats are hypocrites-they attack Roy Moore but love Al Franken," making the attacks on Moore seem more politically-based than based in common decency, enough to sway the election.  This has worked before-they've become memes now but the "...but her emails" were based in reality and were an effective counter to virtually every Donald Trump scandal in 2016.  It says something pretty significant that Jones, who actively avoided getting into tussles with Trump or national Republicans (instead focusing entirely on Moore and local issues) publicly declared six days before the election that Franken needed to resign for the good of the country.  You don't do that unless your internals tell you you need to do so.  Essentially, Democrats were willing to indict Franken relatively quickly because they traded him for Jones.  That wasn't the only reason, but it was one of them to anyone paying attention.  And, it has to be said-it worked.  Jones won a very close election that, while we can never conclusively prove it, may well have been lost had Franken not resigned five days before the Alabama election.

Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL)

There were real-world effects to exchanging Jones for Franken.  Most critically, 23 million people would have lost their healthcare had Jones not won.  This isn't specious reasoning or hyperbole-it's a stone cold fact.  On July 27, 2017, 48 Democrats and 3 Republicans (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain) all voted against what was called "Trumpcare" which the CBO estimated would eventually lead to a rise in the uninsured in this country of roughly 23 million people.  Just one of those 51 senators defects, and it passes.  Franken, of course, voted against this, and his successor Tina Smith stated she would as well.  But McCain died on August 25, 2018, and was replaced by Jon Kyl, who would have voted to repeal.  Mitch McConnell & Paul Ryan, not giving a damn about the impending midterms in the face of such an opportunity, would have brought the bill forward again and it would have passed 51-50 in the Senate...except by then Luther Strange, one of the 49 Republicans who voted for the initial bill, had been replaced by Doug Jones, a Democrat who refused to support Trumpcare.  Though the senators involved had switched, the math hadn't changed thanks to Jones's win.  Roy Moore would have backed Trumpcare, and as a result, Doug Jones's victory (and everything that led up to it) saved 23 million people from losing their healthcare.  By January, when McConnell would have the votes to pass the bill, Nancy Pelosi had become Speaker and therefore made Trumpcare DOA because it could no longer pass the House.

Franken's resignation didn't cost the Democrats much of anything in terms of tangible victories.  Tina Smith votes roughly the same as Franken, and easily won election last November.  Even if you feel that how Franken was treated was unfair, it's worth being a realist about what happened and examine the aftermath.  Is Al Franken, who behaved foolishly and almost certainly inappropriately (even if not comparably to Moore or Trump) worth taking away healthcare from 23 million people?  While I'd imagine that most of his supporters would protest rather than answer that question directly, I think most Democrats in their heart-of-hearts would say "no."  I suspect Franken himself would say the same.  You might claim that what happened in Minnesota wasn't going to change enough minds to impact a race across the country (though the media at the time, the margin in that Jones-Moore race, and a look at the Mark Foley scandal for comparison would beg to differ), but if you acknowledge that in order to get Jones you likely had to let Franken go, it feels like a pretty easy decision to me.

Vice President Al Gore (D-TN)

There's a famous saying that "politics ain't beanbag," essentially meaning that politics is not for the faint-of-heart.  It's also decidedly not fair.  But it is life-and-death literally for countless people, and occasionally it's more important to win than to win "only the right way."  People will argue "but Trump didn't resign and he's still in office," but we don't know the after effects of Trump not resigning.  It's entirely possible that in 2020 Trump will lose an election that Mike Pence, armed with a relatively strong economy, would have won, proving that not resigning was the incorrect decision for his ideals.  I can't help but think while examining the clear ramifications of what happened to Franken & Jones about Bill Clinton nearly 20 years ago.  He, too, stood on his own moral high ground even though he'd clearly lost much faith with the American public.  Had he resigned, Al Gore wouldn't have been forced to pick Joe Lieberman as his running-mate to counter claims he was too linked to Clinton's actions in office, and perhaps would have selected someone more strategic like Florida Sen. Bob Graham.  He also would have been an incumbent president with a good economy and a popular running-mate from a state he lost by 537 votes.  Speculative history is a dangerous parlor game, but it's not hard to imagine that Clinton resigning would have been enough for Al Gore to beat George W. Bush in 2000.  And had that happened, imagine how different the world would be. Gore may well have heeded the intelligence warnings about Osama bin Laden's imminent attack on America.  Even if that weren't the case, Gore surely wouldn't have gone into the Iraq War (which killed hundreds of thousands of people), may well have pursued a more aggressive single payer health plan, would have implemented aggressive world leadership on climate change, and it's entirely possible Brexit doesn't come to fruition since Tony Blair doesn't get sucked into a quagmire over the Iraq War, killing the electoral chances of the Labour Party.

But this didn't happen, because Bill Clinton didn't resign when he had sex with one of his employees because he didn't think that was reason enough to resign.  And of course it would have been impossible to know at the time that Gore would lose by such a microscopic amount and how much impact George W. Bush would have on the country...though it would have been easy to see that Clinton wasn't helping Gore or his causes by spending a year of his presidency on impeachment hearings.  And it's still not clear we know what the full impact of Franken's resignation was, or what someone like Donald Trump's not resigning is.  But it's time for us to start living in reality, and the reality was that Al Franken behaved foolishly, probably inappropriately, and his resignation did an enormous amount of good for this country even if you don't like that that's what it took to win.  Looking at Franken and Clinton's cases, it's hard not to remember that there are no prizes for second place in politics, and the effects of losing, even if you lose for "the right reasons" are sometimes so horrific that "winning the right way or not at all" looks awfully foolish.