The day of reckoning is nigh, according to Al Franken, for George W Bush and the Republicans. Their “dishonesty, hypocrisy, extremism and corruption”, he prophesied in his 2005 polemic, The Truth (With Jokes), would lead to the “utter destruction of the Republican Party within one year and one month of the publication of this book”.
“Did I say that?” asked Franken when we met at the Minneapolis offices from where the satirist, commentator and would-be senator broadcasts his show for the liberal talk-radio network Air America. “Well, it is beginning to implode.” He calculated the timing. The book was out last October; the elections for the US House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are imminent. “That’s soon.” He paused to chuckle drily. “Let’s hope it happens.”
The polls may look good for the Democrats, but by now, a few weeks after my interview with Franken, it is Air America rather than the GOP that is teetering on the brink. After two years on air, the network has filed for bankruptcy protection, causing Vanity Fair’s media columnist, Michael Wolff, to gloat: “The lesson to draw from this is that progressives and liberals don’t know anything about financing a business.”
Franken insists that Air America will continue broadcasting, but it has been hard going. “It’s a little slower than I’d hoped,” he had told me. “Our signals aren’t as strong as I’d like, and we don’t have a lot of money for marketing. But we’ve got 92 affiliates, covering two-thirds of the country. We’re reaching listeners.” At the last count, there were 2.7 million of them: a start, but a long way to go to match the ten million-plus audiences that tune in to the ultra-conservative talk-radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Why would Franken put such effort into this uphill struggle? A 15-year veteran of Saturday Night Live before Air America, Franken was already the author of a bestselling dissection of right-wing propaganda (Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), a successful screenwriter (he co-wrote the Andy Garcia/Meg Ryan hit film When a Man Loves a Woman) and a cameo actor with roles in Trading Places, The Manchurian Candidate and The Rutles.
“I found a Gallup poll which said that 21 per cent of Americans get the majority of their news from talk radio,” he explained. “I thought that we can’t totally cede this territory [to the right].” So, two years ago, he helped found Air America as a “progressive alternative”.
In conversation, 55-year-old Franken, who has two grown-up children with his wife, Franni, is even-toned and reasonable. But the anger is there in the many charges he lays against the Republicans and the right-wing media, principally Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. “They’ve replaced these institutions that used to exist, like, you know, the news,” Franken said, “with a sort of fake news.”
He cited the Duelfer report on Iraq’s weapons readiness. “It said that we had 1,200 weapons inspectors, that we talked to every scientist who was in the WMD programme, and they all said the same thing – that there were no weapons of mass destruction. But that can come out and be ignored because it’s not highlighted on Fox, and if it’s in the New York Times it’s suspect. They just hammer and hammer that there is a liberal bias to the mainstream media, and that gives you the perfect right to dismiss everything you see in any respectable news organisation.”
This is how, according to Franken, the subsequently disproven accusations of the Swift Boat Veterans against John Kerry managed to gain such currency. The last US presidential election, he says, was won by “smears, fears and queers” – smearing Kerry’s war record, playing on the fears of Americans post 9/11, and misrepresenting Kerry’s position on gay marriage and abortion. “These people are not shy about stretching the truth and misleading people. After a while, they have a sort of Pavlovian response: to lie.”
Franken is not just battling back on the airwaves. Last year he moved his show from New York to Minnesota, where he grew up, to test the water for a Senate run in 2008. A comedian going into politics isn’t so strange in a country that has elected to office actors, pop singers and even a wrestler – Jesse Ventura, who was governor of Franken’s home state. His already high profile has been further raised by the recent US cinematic release of a documentary film, Al Franken: God spoke, which BBC4 will screen next year.
Publicly, Franken says he won’t announce until next year; privately, he’s said to have decided already to stand against the Republican Norm Coleman, who gained fame this side of the Atlantic for his ill-advised confrontation with George Galloway during the Senate hearings on the UN oil-for-food programme. Coleman, says Franken bluntly, is “one of the administration’s leading butt boys”. Air America may be in trouble, but its star host is far from giving up the fight.
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