Franken is just a symptom of a much bigger malignancy. The more Republicans focus on the symptoms and not the cancer that is democrat/liberal post modern relativism the more they will continue to fail.
Posted on 01/10/2009 9:33:20 AM PST by Responsibility2nd
With only a longshot court appeal standing in the way of Democrat Al Franken’s election to the Senate, Republicans are gritting their teeth and bracing for the arrival of a new senator whose every utterance will sound like nails on a chalkboard to them.
While Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) has filed suit to contest the results of a disputed recount process that turned his narrow lead into a 225-vote deficit, his likely defeat stands to turn Franken, the polarizing former “Saturday Night Live” writer, into the senator who launched a thousand direct mail fundraising appeals.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever had an opponent who is so disliked by Republicans as Al Franken,” said Minnesota Republican Party Chair Ron Carey, who cautioned that Coleman’s election challenge could still turn the results back his way. “It’s one thing to lose to an honorable opponent, but Al Franken is not considered an honorable opponent by Minnesota Republicans.”
Marty Seifert, the Republican leader in the Minnesota House of Representatives, said Franken’s long record of antagonizing conservatives would make it difficult for him to connect with voters who supported Coleman.
“It’s going to be hard for Franken to be very effective with any Republicans, in terms of having any credibility with us, just because he’s been so nasty in the past,” Seifert said. “He certainly has callous and very partisan behavior in the past that is beyond the pale.”
According to Carleton College political scientist Steven Schier, Franken’s record as a “flamboyant and aggressive partisan” would make him ripe for criticism back home.
“I think it’s impossible to overstate the hostility Minnesota Republicans feel toward Al Franken,” Schier said. “He will be a very useful fundraising tool.”
Republicans outside Minnesota are equally apoplectic when it comes to Franken. Prominent conservative Rush Limbaugh, who Franken mocked in the title of one of his books, has already jabbed Franken on his radio show, telling listeners in December that Franken “won’t quit [the Senate race] because he doesn’t know how to get a real job…He’s a pathetic figure.”
Democrats are hopeful that the resentment Franken faces from Republicans both within and outside of his home state will not impede his ability to win over his constituents – and his fellow members of the U.S. Senate. They believe that by leaving behind his past as a bomb-throwing entertainer and focusing on issues, he will earn the respect of colleagues and can build on the 42 percent of the vote he won in November.
“Every freshman senator will have a problem fitting in with that crew, but his will be a little more difficult,” said former Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch, who was the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s nominee for governor in 2006.
Hatch, who served as attorney general during the gubernatorial term of former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura, said celebrity candidates can’t take the habits of their old jobs with them into office.
“There is this instinct and discipline of 20 or 30 years in the entertainment business…to draw attention,” Hatch said. “He has to have a filter.”
Polling results this week confirmed Franken's precarious position: more Minnesotans have a negative impression of him than a positive one, by a 45 percent to 37 percent margin. Those would be dismal numbers under any circumstances, but for a newly-elected senator they would be particularly alarming.
Matt Entenza, the former DFL Party leader in the Minnesota House, said Franken had defied expectations in the Senate race by restraining his sense of humor and campaigning as a sober workhorse.
“The struggle for the campaign was always trying to communicate that he was a serious guy, and in some ways I think they toned him down almost too much, tried to be almost too serious,” he explained. “You would see local TV anchors giving him questions that were designed to give him an opportunity for a humorous response. He would give a very serious, wonkish policy response.”
Former DFL Sen. Mark Dayton agreed: “He had to show people that he was really serious about issues, that he had a depth of policy understanding.”
It’s not just Democrats who expect Franken, the author of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” will chart a different course in the Senate.
Tim Penny, a former DFL congressman who joined the Minnesota Independence Party to run for governor in 2002, said he expected Franken to be hyper-cautious about reviving concerns about his past career as a comedian and political provocateur.
“I expect that on Capitol Hill he will be a very serious legislator – almost to the extreme,” Penny said.
“I think he’s very determined to separate himself from that image of being nothing but a comedian,” he continued. “I doubt he’ll be accepting very many speaking engagements around the country, and to the extent that he does, I don’t think they’ll get the comedian they’re expecting.”
While Franken’s allies in Minnesota are optimistic about his ability to temper his style to one that is more suited to the Senate, Republicans say self-restraint may not come so easily to such an experienced performer.
“If he was in the U.S. Senate, would there be any professional decorum he could exhibit?” asked Carey, the GOP chairman. “Would he be able to control himself?”
Indeed, at the height of the campaign, even as he was locked in the political equivalent of mortal combat with Coleman, Franken couldn’t quite resist the comedic impulse, consulting on a “Saturday Night Live” skit mocking Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in late September.
“I think that he’ll have a constant battle between the desire for – how shall I put it? – comedic satisfaction and a senatorial image,” said Schier. “Can he help himself? Can he prevent himself from trying to be funny in a controversial way?”
And though Franken may have tried to project a serious image on the campaign trail, he struggled to escape his record as a performer, and some of his more off-color writings wound up in Republican press releases and advertisements.
In May, the Minnesota Republican Party drew attention to an article Franken wrote for Playboy in 2000, titled “Porn-o-Rama!”, charging that it represented “the disrespectful writings of a nearly 50-year-old man who seems to think that women’s bodies are the domain of a man who just wants to have a good time.”
Later in the race, a Coleman ad criticized Franken for writing “tasteless, sexist jokes,” “juicy porn” and “foul-mouthed attacks on anyone he disagrees with.”
The attacks apparently stuck, at least with Republicans. Republican activist Joe Repya, a retired military officer who considered running against Coleman in the GOP primary, said Franken is “viewed by both sides as a mean-spirited, carpet-bagging, foul-mouthed sexist supported by Hollywood money.”
“Franken, to his credit, was able to make enough people believe that he was only a comedian and that his skits and writings didn’t really show his real self,” Repya said.
In addition to his background as a comedian, Penny said Franken could turn out to be a senator whose voting record proves out of the Minnesota political mainstream.
“He will be a very reliable, 90-plus percent vote for the Democratic leadership,” Penny said, suggesting Franken would be “down the line, in synch with the Democratic interest groups.”
With heated criticism likely to come Franken’s way throughout a term in the Senate, Dayton suggested one way Franken’s former career could come in handy.
“I hope he retains a sense of humor,” Dayton said. “A sense of humor is a valuable asset in politics in general, and in the Senate.”
He quickly added: “In the right context.”
I’m baffled why you thought that was necessary to say.
It’s a problem that exists, or we wouldn’t be addressing it. What would you suggest, we not talk about it since it’s been a problem for a while? I’ll be talking about it until it’s no longer a problem, so buckle up.
Yep, your dad was right. Thanks.
Think Juan McStain...
If that doesn’t throw cold water on your hopes and dreams, not much will.
I heard Dick Morris telling Sean Hannity this on the radio yesterday.
He had the data on actual votes verses voters.
To repeat: More votes were cast in the Colemna/Franken debacle than there were voters.
Does anyone have a link on this? Just because it seems like a plausable Democratic ploy - business as usual - I would like to verify....
Franken is just a symptom of a much bigger malignancy. The more Republicans focus on the symptoms and not the cancer that is democrat/liberal post modern relativism the more they will continue to fail.
Any state that would send Al Franken to the senate is to stupid to be a state.
OK, I’m back with the data.
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2009/01/08/frankens-funny-business/#more-522
As John F. Kennedy once said, “sometimes partisanship demands too much.” Watching Al Franken and the Democrats steal this election, vote by vote, is a horrific sight that makes a mockery of the electoral process, the fundamental element in our democracy. If this travesty is allowed to stand, it essentially means that any close election constitutes an open invitation to try to steal the victory.
You can help stop Al Franken, support the Republican National Lawyers Association fight — Go Here Now
We must not permit the Minnesota Democrats to get away with this election heist. The Republican National Lawyers Association is leading the fight for a fair vote in Minnesota. The RNLA has not brought suit, they are lending legal support. Help them in their important cause.
The recount actually wants to count ballots in twenty-five precincts that would bring the total of votes cast higher than the actual number of people who voted! In Ramsey County, 177 more votes have been counted than people who voted on Election Day. The canvassing board, in effect, is admitting that it is counting fraudulent, duplicate ballots! In some cases absentee ballots, particularly from troops serving overseas, have been counted. In other cases, not. One ballot, on which Franken was crossed out and replaced by “Frankenstein” was counted as a Democratic vote.
Apparently, when a ballot was challenged, a copy was made to facilitate examination. But, in many cases, the canvasser failed to label the ballot as a duplicate. Then, in the recount, all the ballots were counted, ensuring that the challenged vote was not only counted, but counted twice.
What makes all of this suspicious in the extreme is that each of these errors inured to Franken’s advantage and eroded Coleman’s election night lead until the Democrat could claim victory.
At the same time that the Democrats are getting away with their chicanery in Minnesota, Governor Rob Blagojevich is succeeding at appointing the successor to Obama in Illinois. The success of his appointment was inevitable once the Illinois Legislature, again with a heavy Democratic majority, refused to order a special election for the vacant Senate seat. So afraid were they that the Republicans might win the special balloting that they would rather let Blagojevich make the possibly corrupt appointment than give the voters the chance to make the decision.
We now will likely never know if the new Senator Burris complied with Blagojevich’s fantasies and actually paid for his seat in the Senate. But the very fact that we have the Governor of the state on tape preparing to make such a demand of whoever he appointed should give us pause. That Illinois’ Democrats would rather have us speculate than give their voters the franchise is as revolting, in its own way, as the Great Minnesota Senate Seat Robbery.
Mark Twain said that people should never have to see sausage being made or a law being passed. Add to that a recount in progress.
Al Franken: the new face of the Democrat Party.
You should take your own advice--we've been talking about this subject for, oh, years around here.
I don't think it was Fruitcake himself the GOP had to beat, but the deeply entrenched, highly effective ACORN people who are well established in Minnesota. The GOP voters could have turned out in droves, but the ACORN operatives would just make more Democrat ballots. Franken was in the minute Soros decided to bankroll his campaign and election.
But, BOY, ARE YOU EVER RIGHT!
Although I have no doubt it’s true, that’s not “data”, it’s just a blog post. He doesn’t explain what he’s basing his claims on.
I’d love to see something that couldn’t be ignored by MSM.
We’re not always going to get people to buy into sound political and economic policy. There is always going to be an ebb and flow to this. What bothers me most, is that our political candidates don’t even try to sell Conservative principles. They seem focused on convincing the public that they are really just about as liberal as the Marxist they are running against.
Then the leftists vote for the real Marxist, and the pretend Marxist doesn’t get Conservative votes. For heaven’s sake, play to your base folks. Quit playing to their base.
Yes, our populace doesn’t get it at times. I’ll have to tell you though, they can be forgiven for not doing so, when there’s nobody explaining what “IT” is for the most part.
What is Conservatism? Have you heard any candidate explain it in recent times? Sarah Palin came as close as anyone I know of in recent times.
A lot of folks talk about California, as if it’s just lost ground and will never come back. Then Proposition 8 is put on the ballot, and it passes comfortably. For the record, Proposition 8 put the matter off gay marriage before the public. If you didn’t want homosexual marriage, you voted for Proposition 8. And yes it passed. What does that tell us? It tells us, that if an issue is clearly defined, a Conservative approach will win. Just damn, who would have thunk it? I’ve been saying it for years. The California RP leadership is blind, deaf, and dumb. What can you say?
Well, what you can say, is that our federal leadership has utterly failed us. Don’t blame California, if the national leadership is okay with California’s RP leadership. You better look at the leadership that is going to fail to support Conservatism from the national level. They are failing your state as well, even if it hasn’t showed up yet. Why is California’s RP leadership so bad? Do you think it’s not doing what the federal level leadership is telling it to do? Think about it!
Look folks, we’re just not selling Conservatism. You can have the best product on the block, but if you’re not letting the public know what it is and that it is available at a decent price, you’re not going to make any sales.
We’ve got the product. We don’t have the salesmen. We’re not making any cold calls. We’re all tied up with fascination of emulating the worst people this nation has ever seen, as if pretending to be one of them will curry favor, win votes.
It will alienate so may people, that we will lose almost every election where it is tried. We must STOP it!
Hawk Conservatism. When lefitst policy falls flat on it’s face, be there to pick up the pieces. As it is, we have a dumb ass Republican Governor in California that has driven home the point that Republicans are no better than Democrats. If he had stuck to his guns and hawked fiscal Conservatism, the public would know where to go for a fix. If our federal office holders had screamed from the mountain tops that our polices were going to cause a collapse and we must change them, the public would know where to go for a fix. Instead they used the milk-toast approach, (using a monotone almost silent voice), “Ah folks... over here... I think we have a problem... ah anyone listening... ah I don’t want to upset anyone, but have you looked over here. Oh I better be quiet now. I might upset someone.” NO, yell it from the mountain tops.
Let folks know why Conservatism is better. Don’t convince them that Conservatives were complicit. For heaven’s sake, we have committed suicide as a movement. We acquiesce to vote for guys like Juan McStain just so we won’t get Obama. And what do we wind up with? We wind up with people who are destroying our cause.
Right now the public is convinced there isn’t a lick of difference between the two parties. And we ask ourself why the public is split about 50/50, not knowing where to turn.
It’s our own damned fault. Conservatism wasn’t hawked, it wasn’t implemented, and the liberal policies that brought us down were not framed constantly, so the public could see the fallacy of those ruinous policies for what they were.
Well... here we are. Confusion reigns. Chaos rules the day...
The Republican Party couldn’t have destroyed Conservatism better, if it had spent the last twenty years trying. Oh wait. It essentially did.
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