Posted on 03/03/2006 9:52:35 AM PST by presidio9
Talk about your sources of clean energy: Al Franken has been letting the gas out of pompous politicians and the silver-tongued sycophants who suck up to them since Gerald Ford stumbled into the presidency.
If you were wondering whether "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot," the title of Franken's 1996 best-seller left little doubt where Al stands on the matter. His 2003 political field day, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," and his 2005 President Bush-whacking followup, "The Truth (With Jokes)," gained him serious attention as an astute liberal watchdog whose wonky team of researchers, TeamFranken, gets the goods in cyberspace before he gets the laughs.
In 1975, Franken, along with Minneapolis school chum and fellow class clown Tom Davis, were recruited as writers with a new NBC show called "Saturday Night Live." Five years and three Emmys later, Franken and Davis followed Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi to Hollywood, where Franken and Davis wrote the movie "Coneheads," among others.
Franken's political acumen (he holds a degree from Harvard in political science and served as a 2003 fellow with Harvard's Kennedy School of Government) steered him into the spin zone of political commentary, where right-wing politicians and pundits are his primary targets of choice. He even imagined his own ascendancy to the highest office in his 1999 political parody, "Why Not Me?" in which he campaigns on a single issue: lower ATM fees.
In March 2004 Franken kicked off Air America, talk radio's liberal counter to Limbaugh and other right-wing fear mongers. As his writing and commentary have become increasingly serious, so have his political aspirations; he and wife Franni recently moved back to Minnesota, where Franken is contemplating a Senate bid for real in 2008.
Bankrate caught up with the fast-moving Franken by cell phone in New York City to discuss his finances, his future and his dream of buying just one stock.
Bankrate: Do you handle your own finances?
Al Franken: I am not very hands-on with my money; my wife, Franni, is much more hands-on. She really manages our finances. We have a division of labor in the family, and one of her jobs is money. She grew up kind of poor and is very conservative when it comes to money. We invest like retired school principals.
Bankrate: Did you grow up with easy access to money?
Franken: No, I grew up very middle class. My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate -- he didn't have a career as such, he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.
My grandmother, my dad's mother, was widowed pretty young, and she was a German "hausfrau" and she never spent a dime. We moved to Minnesota and she lived in New York, and every Sunday morning at 9 a.m. sharp during the 1950s and '60s we would get a call from my grandmother and she would tell the operator to interrupt her at three minutes, and that was it. My dad would pick up the phone and go, "Liebchen," because they were German immigrants, and after three minutes, that was it. And she, by virtue of investing and stuff like that, left our family a couple hundred thousand dollars or something, which actually meant something then. It was sort of what carried my parents through and got us through college.
Bankrate: She sounds like a character.
Franken: It was a very odd wrinkle in my family's financial history. She was one step up from a lady who collects cans and leaves $200,000 to the city of Memphis or something. She lived in this little apartment in Washington Heights, in this lousy area of New York that became lousier every day. And if you'd come she would bake an apple pie, and she'd have the same dress and shoes on that she'd worn for 60 years, and she'd steam stamps off envelopes, that kind of thing. I still have a vestige of that mentality, and my wife certainly has it because her father died when she was 17 months old. She had a sister who was three months old, she had three other siblings, and her mother had a high school education and worked at a grocery store in the produce department. They had the heat turned off, the phone turned off, there wasn't enough food.
Bankrate: Which explains why she manages the finances, right?
Franken: Well, before I married my wife, I said either I should marry someone really rich or someone who grew up really poor because the really poor person won't expect much. But what I found out is that she also is so conservative that it's crazy. For instance, I used to do corporate speeches a lot, and every once in a while I would do a corporate speech for a group and come home and say, "Honey, we should buy this stock," and she'll go, "No. We don't buy stock; we buy mutual funds that our business manager picks out and they're very conservative." And I go, "Yeah, but let's buy this stock." So finally last January, after I've had a number of very good years because I've been writing the books and stuff, we're meeting with our business managers or accountants or whatever they are, and I said, "Can I buy a stock? One stock? Because I'm sure about this stock." I won't say what the company was, but I gave a speech there in the fall of 2002, I went to their place of business, everyone seemed very happy. I gave a speech to a group of people who used their products, who were professionals and very smart, loved their product. I met the CEO and thought he was great, and he's Republican. She wouldn't let me buy it in 2002, so finally in late January 2005, she let me buy one stock. And it has almost doubled (laughs). It's the only one that I've ever really been sure of.
My wife looks at it as a very dangerous thing. She looks at it like I was in Atlantic City and won a lot of money at blackjack and caught the gambling bug and I'm going to turn into Bill Bennett. Her take was "This is bad." No, it's good! Look! We made money!
Bankrate: Your family must have wondered how you could come out of Harvard and go into comedy.
Franken: I've got to give my parents credit; my dad didn't graduate high school, my mom didn't go to college, they emphasized education, education, education when we were kids. My brother Owen, the first in the family to go to college, goes to MIT. Five years later, I go to Harvard. He graduates from MIT in physics and is so alienated from physics because so much of it is being used for killing people that he becomes a photojournalist. Then I go to Harvard and I tell them I'm going to be a comedian. And you'd expect that these people who so emphasized education as a way to get up and get out would go, "What did we do wrong?" But they didn't. To their eternal credit, they were very supportive; they didn't blink an eye.
Bankrate: Did you endure the usual years of macaroni and cheese?
Franken: No, I was very lucky, I had two lean years and then "Saturday Night Live." The first year wasn't exactly a bad year for Tom (Davis) and I; we split $500 a week at first because, as apprentice writers, the Writers Guild allowed us to be considered one person (laughs). It didn't bode ill for the partnership, and even so, we were thrilled because we were working. I could pay my rent and actually go to a restaurant, and that's all I really cared about. We started getting actual money in around the third year, but it was never that much money in the first five years, ever. By the end of the first five years, it was maybe like being a doctor (laughs).
Bankrate: Did you have any doubts you would make it in comedy?
Franken: I've had some dark nights of despair where I've thought, "Maybe I'm not funny anymore? Maybe I should have done something else?" But no, that's gone. I'm too old now.
Bankrate: You've been particularly successful at pointing out the absurdities of political figures. Are you ever afraid that politicians will stop giving you so much material with which to work?
Franken: I'm not worried. (Laughs) Really. Honest.
Bankrate: Though you've made a successful fictional run for the presidency (in "Why Not Me?"), are real politics in your future?
Franken: I'm considering it. I've moved back to Minnesota, I've started doing politics there, helping other people. I'll see what happens. I've not made any secret about the fact that I'm looking at the 2008 Senate race and considering it.
Franken will be elected to the US Senate when Hell goes Methodist.
This truly shocked me.
"Franken ... holds a degree from Harvard in political science and served as a 2003 fellow with Harvard's Kennedy School of Government."
Never underestimate liberals!!
Just when you think they have done every possible ignorant, stupid, infantile, lying thing, they always come up with something else.
Funny how there's no mention of its success.
He is so assinine...can be on a billboard as a
typical...Democrat....with emphasis on the last three letters...in spades. O'Reilly cleaned his clock a
few times...he is like the loudmouth in school who
backs away from a fight...used to be called.."sissy: Jake
Remember, Minnesota is the state that elected Jesse "The Body" Ventura its governor. It also elected Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale. Don't be surprised at anything that happens in the land of the "Red Star."
Ironically, one of the only funny things I think he's ever said.
MN has a GOP governor and Republican Norm Coleman is in the Senate. I know all about Jessie V.
This man defines unstable and unbalanced. But of course, that would make you a good lib, wouldn't it?
You can't forget Wellstone.
I have a certain amount of respect for Humphrey and Mondale. They are far different animals from today's liberals. I wouldn't vote for either, but they were men of conscience, not convenience.
Im sure there were a lot of new yorkers that said the same thing about hillary when she first considered a senate run
Sadly, I remember how laughable it all sounded when Mrs. Clinton began her listening tour.
Bring it on. It should be a fun.
Wellstone was a fluke. Franken is a fraud.
Al Franken is a distant cousin of CNN's Bob Franken. His older brother, Owen Franken, is a photojournalist.
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