Al Franken: The Happy Warrior
Last November, Al Franken had this great idea for a sketch.
Bits still come to him, unbidden, all of these years after Saturday Night Live. He doesn't do anything with them. At this stage in his life, as a U.S. senator representing his home state of Minnesota, passing along a freebie to one of his friends in show business would leave Franken with little control over the final outcome. ("Many a slip 'twixt cup and lip," as one of his favorite sayings goes.) Anyway, the idea for the bit came after Donald Trump's first postelection visit to the White House – that fleeting moment when, after meeting with Barack Obama, Trump seemed uncharacteristically humbled by the awesomeness of his new responsibility, and perhaps even spooked enough to lean on his predecessor for advice.
We open on an Oval Office set. You've got Alec Baldwin playing Trump, of course, and Jay Pharaoh would come back as Obama, Will Ferrell as W., Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton, Dana Carvey as Bush Sr. And the ex-presidents have gathered to spin Trump a fiction: that each of them had consulted extensively with the man he'd replaced. "I gotta tell you, George was unbelievable," Hammond's Clinton would say, wrapping his arm Bubba-ishly around Trump's shoulder. "I'd been governor for so long, but I did not know what I was doing when I got here. And here's George, I beat him, and every day he was the first person I talked to – for an hour! – and he was the last person I talked to before I went to bed. And I just could not have done that first term without him!"
Franken, who is laying out the sketch for me in Washington one afternoon in May, pauses to loose a nasal, honking laugh. Unlike our current president, Franken laughs often, and loudly, both at his own jokes and at the jokes of others. "?'Yeah, that's how it's done,'?" he continues in a hoarse Arkansas drawl. "?'You listen to the last guy.'??" Franken shakes his head wistfully. He'd actually considered submitting this one. "I think I didn't," he admits, "partly because I was kind of hoping that was Obama's play. That he'd go, like, 'I can call you every morning if you want!' I didn't want to ruin it."
Instead, Franken returned to the grim new reality of his current day job. He attended Trump's inauguration, which he describes in his admirably incautious new memoir, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate, as "perhaps the most depressing moment I've had since I entered politics, though that record has been repeatedly surpassed since January 20." That sentence was written before Trump's sacking of FBI Director James Comey, the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel in the Russia investigation, and the outrageous, near-daily series of concurrent leaks, most swirling around what looks an awful lot like obstruction of justice by the president. The bewildering ineptitude of the alleged misdeeds felt nearly as shocking as the misdeeds themselves, and simply keeping apace of the scandals can be exhausting, even for a sitting U.S. senator: Franken was commuting home from work one night when his driver told him the news about Comey. Franken said, "No! That's crazy!" He chuckles at the memory, then continues, "We have to have patience [with the special counsel], because this needs to be done right. But it feels like it's building, and like it has a life of its own."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/al-franken-on-trump-working-with-republicans-doing-acid-w484586?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=053017_12
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