Everybody’s weighing in on Minnesota’s new junior senator.
Writing in The New York Times, Victor Navasky, former publisher of The Nation and chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, has a message for Al Franken: “Turning your back on your comedic past would be a big mistake.”
Navasky writes:
The Senate, let’s not forget, is already filled with blowhards, policy wonks and, if you will, lying liars. It’s a mistake to assume that if he puts his comic talents to work in the Senate, like Rodney Dangerfield, Mr. Franken will automatically lose its respect. Why worry about being the only comedian in Congress when the whole place is a comedy club?
And Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who talked to the Jewish World last week, talks to Politico.com about having the Frankens as house guests.
Ornstein, who like Franken is from St. Louis Park, emphasizes that the satirist has embarked on a new career:
I don’t think he’s going to stop saying things that might be funny or that others would interpret that way as part of his natural persona. But he’s now got a serious job in a serious time in the country, so people who are looking at him as a comic now are just looking in the wrong way.
Given the state of American politics lately — and I’m thinking Gov. Mark Sanford, Sen. John Ensign, Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. David Vitter, former Sen. Larry Craig et al. — and the varied and severe crises facing the nation, you’ve got to laugh just to keep from crying. — Mordecai Specktor
