Al Franken is fighting for the DFL (Democratic) nomination for the US Senate from Minnesota to meet Norm Coleman in the general election this Fall. Franken faces a challenge from progressive Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, a Peace and Justice professor from St. Thomas University in St. Paul. The battle between national commentator and university professor has brought out passionate arguments on both sides. I'm working for Al, and this why.
Al Franken should be the next senator from Minnesota.
I know that in my heart, and I’ll tell you why:
I’ve been meaning to write this ever since February, when I was elected as a delegate for Al Franken to the state DFL convention. For the past two months I’ve been constantly approached by people from the Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer campaign making their argument for nominating Jack to run against Norm Coleman in the fall.
The essence of their argument is that Jack is right on the issues, Jack’s a better human being, and given time Jack will be seen to be the better candidate for the Senate after he gets the nomination and the people of Minnesota find out who he is.
The Jack people say to me that all that Al Franken has is money, name-recognition, and a flimsy argument that somehow Al is "more electable."
With respect, I believe Al Franken is "more electable" because he’s proven to all of us that he’s a better leader. Let me explain what that means to me.
I believe it takes a powerful combination of four qualities to win an election like this:
- Building a network of support across the state
- Being right on the issues in the eyes of the people
- Having the talent and integrity to be a national leader who can get things done
- Having the political talent to win the election
And Al Franken wins on all four counts.
Al’s done the hard work of reaching out across the state for the past two years, building alliances and developing a much strong network of supporters. Proof? Al Franken is endorsed by 20 unions across the state--including the AFL-CIO and Education Minnesota. He’s taken the time to explain his case and build a network of support from the Iron Range to Austin, from Marshall to Stillwater.
Most important, he can carry the swing districts in places like Chaska and Plymouth, Eagan, and CD1 because he’s done the work of making his case as a thoughtful progressive who can succeed as a US Senator.
That's not the glamorous part of politics, that's the hand-made people relationships that make a candidate successful, and that will make a senator successful for years to come. That's what Paul Wellstone did in the late 1980s. That's what Amy Klobuchar did, and why she will be in the Senate for years to come. Jack hasn’t, Al has. The proof is in the results from the caucuses, and the people who are standing up for Al and endorsing him. Did I mention the 20 unions including the AFL-CIO and Education Minnesota?
It will take more than just being right on the issues to win this election, and much more to be a successful and effective senator. That is why Al Franken must be the DFL nominee, and why Al Franken will be elected in November.
Jack proposes a clear, progressive agenda. So does Al Franken. But Al Franken understands how to take that progressive agenda and get it actually enacted into programs and laws that will actually change people’s lives.
I’ll take one issue on which Al and Jack differ which to me explains why Jack wouldn’t be effective in the US Senate, let alone get elected this fall: universal health care.
Jack supports single payer health care—a nationalization of the US health care industry. Al proposes instead a three step process that starts with a federally funded mandate for universal coverage by the states through the current health insurance system, a single payer health care system for all children under 18, and making Medicare a single payer health care system.
Jack says "you fight for this ideal. If it doesn’t happen, then you compromise."
Here’s the choice between Al and Jack in perfect relief. Jack’s position is an ideal, and one I believe is filled with unanswered questions.
How will the plan for single payer health care be passed in congress? How will the national consensus for nationalizing the health care industry be built? If by a miracle a national consensus for single payer health care could be built in the next four years—a political impossibility in my opinion—how would we transition? What is the best structure for our national health care system? How do we build the consensus among Republicans, Democrats, doctors, nurses, the states? What kind of administration systems do we use?
Most important, what happens to the 46 million un-insured Americans, many of them children and seniors, during the years and years of political fighting over a single payer health care? What happens when they get sick while we’re fighting this good fight? How do you get things done?
Al’s position understands the reality of getting things done, of actually getting people health care coverage.
Focus on kids and seniors, and get single payer health care for them as quickly as possible using the existing government mechanisms. Then not only require the states to ensure the remaining 20 million un-insured, give them the funding to do it, through the existing health care insurance system. Then, once these guarantees are in place, build the transition to single payer healthcare starting with those state programs that are working—and here Minnesota could lead the real transition to single payer healthcare. That’s a realistic plan that focuses on the most vulnerable of the un-insured and gets a real plan in place fast.
Which position will result in more effective universal health care quicker? Which one will actually get enacted in Washington? You can choose your side. We could send Jack to Washington to be the liberal rabble-rouser, the George McGovern of single-payer health care.
Or we can send Al Franken to Washington and actually get kids and seniors universally covered in the next few years.
You choose.
Politics is our ideology wrestling with reality. There are millions of kids and seniors who will go untreated if we can’t get the process of reform moving. Al can do that in Washington and I believe that Jack can’t.
Al Franken is a national leader, a powerful, articulate voice for progressive politics in America for the last decade, through dark years where the opinions and ideas of Americans were being assaulted by the lies and half-lies of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Fox News and oh yes, that smiley-faced knucklehead president of ours, George W. Bush.
Al Franken was there, pushing our arguments against the so called "war on terror," the insane, tragic miss-management of the war in Iraq, disasters like Hurricane Katrina, and the fight for working class issues like fair trade, the minimum wage. Al was there as a national leader.
He did that with direct, well-reasoned arguments, backed by meticulous research. And he did it by satirizing the insanity of an administration that seriously believed it could convince us that we can and should live forever at "threat level orange."
Taken together, all that makes Al more electable. It’s ain’t because he's good at money-raising or PR--- it’s because he's good at being a real leader.
He's earned my respect as a national leader at a time when the Republican neo-cons thought they were on the verge of establishing a permanent Republican majority in America. Now that we're waking up from our long national nightmare, Al Franken is the leader from our party who will beat Norm Coleman and go on to become a leading voice in the US Senate as part of a progressive majority that can start the repair the disaster of the last eight years.
If progressive activists want the DFL to hand the Senate nomination to a peace and justice professor with no experience—no national experience, no electoral experience, nothing he can point undecided voters to to say "I can make a difference in Washington"--- they will have the satisfaction of handing it to a person who will be ideologically perfect---and unqualified by his experience, and therefore unable to win in the general election against Norm Coleman.
And that will be a tragedy.
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is not Paul Wellstone for precisely the same reasons that Al Franken is. Paul Wellstone built a network across the state, as a citizen and as a candidate in 1982. It was Wellstone’s ability to build a grassroots campaign across the entire state that gave him his slim chance of winning. Paul Wellstone made his argument for the Senate in 1990 by galvanizing the growing fatigue and distrust of Republicans and Rudy Boschwitz. He made a clear, powerful argument tying Rudy Boschwitz to the Reagan administration’s systematic abuse of middle-class voters.
And in the final days of that campaign it was Paul Wellstone’s sharper political skills that allowed him to close the deal when Boschwitz made his mistakes in the fall campaign. (Remember, too Wellstone just barely won by 45,000 votes out of almost 2 million cast.)
Finally, let’s all remember Paul Wellstone was very funny guy.
And his humor, his satire of Rudy Boschwitz as pompous, big-money windbag, was what jump started the Wellstone campaign in the fall of 1990 and gave him his chance to win. He used humor, that ability to prick the balloon of pretense, as one of his main weapons to skewer Rudy Boschwitz so badly that Boschwitz was the only incumbent senator to lose re-election in 1990. As the Greeks say, anger is the mask of fear, and humor is the mask of strength.
We’re going to elect a leader to the US Senate this fall from Minnesota, and I am convinced that the DFL nominee will be that leader. Our candidate will win because the wave of revulsion against the Republicans is swelling.
And our candidate will win because he is a national leader with a realistic, progressive platform of ideas to heal this country. And he will win because people all across the state of Minnesota already know he is someone with the talent and intelligence to be our voice in the Senate.
And he will win because he knows how to win, he has the leadership and skill to make that case against Norm Coleman, and when he wins, to actually get things done when he gets to Washington.
And baby, that candidate is Al Franken.