Democrats Need to Learn From Their Al Franken Mistake
Al Franken, the former Democratic senator from Minnesota, should never have been pressured, even bullied, into resigning from office. The accusations against him were not properly vetted. Their seriousness was not properly weighed. Nevertheless, the frenzy that followed the accusations resulted in his Democratic colleagues making it impossible for him to continue as a senator.
His departure from the Senate—he officially resigned on January 2, 2018—continues to rankle and reverberate. The lessons of this debacle remain unlearned, and the consequences of Franken’s case continue to play out, in the presidential race and beyond. The Democratic reaction to the Franken allegations and the precedents it set will present a danger to the Democratic Party until it reconsiders the episode, and thinks about ways to stop such unfair and swift destruction from happening.
After years in the public eye on Saturday Night Live, as a best-selling author, and as a radio host, Franken remade himself into a successful, high-profile politician. He championed women’s causes and was a devastatingly effective questioner of officials in Donald Trump’s administration. With a former reality-television host in the White House, it had become plausible that Trump could be challenged by an opponent who used to be a comedian.
[Read: Al Franken, that photo, and trusting the women]
It all began to unravel on November 16, 2017, with the release of a photo taken on an airplane during a 2006 USO tour, two years before Franken was elected to the Senate. It showed Franken’s USO co-star, Leeann Tweeden, asleep in a chair, dressed in a helmet, fatigues, and a body-armor vest. Franken is leering into the camera, his hands spread above Tweeden’s breasts—his hands appear to be hovering, not making contact.
I found it an inoffensive burlesque of a burlesque—they were, after all, on a USO tour, which is a raunchy vaudeville throwback. But I recognized that my reaction belonged to the pre–#MeToo world. That’s the world Franken was still in when he issued this initial perfunctory apology: “As
