The Case of Al Franken

Jane Mayer, in a remarkably deeply researched piece for The New Yorker:


That’s quite a paragraph.

First and foremost, I think Mayer makes an incredibly solid case that Franken was railroaded. When the scandal first broke, Franken himself immediately called for a Senate Ethics Committee investigation. That investigation should have been allowed to run its course, and it seems clear now, based on Mayer’s reporting, that his resignation was not called for.

Second, the Democrats lost their single best television presence. It shouldn’t be this way but it is: being good at TV is very good for politics. However repugnant you think Donald Trump is as a man and as a president, there’s no denying that he is very good at being on TV — he hosted a prime time network TV show for over a dozen years, and likely would still be hosting it today if, you know, he hadn’t been elected president. Ronald Reagan was underestimated by the political class because he was “just an actor”, but that’s exactly why he should have been taken very seriously from the moment he entered politics: he was amazingly good at being on TV.

Franken is very smart, very funny, and very good at being on TV — and he was great at making his questioning in Senate hearings work for TV. I’m not saying Democrats should have looked the other way at egregious behavior just because he was good on TV, but Franken’s importance to the party at a national level should have at least made them look twice at whether what he’d actually done was actually egregious.

Wednesday, 24 July 2019