Franken Begins Senate Campaign

Al Franken ’73 became the most recent entrant into the 2008 fray yesterday—though the liberal radio host and political satirist set his sights a notch lower than other early declarers.

Franken said yesterday that he would challenge Republican Sen. Norman B. Coleman (R-Minn.) next year, confirming longtime rumors that he would mount a bid for the Senate. Before taking on Coleman, Franken will face off against wealthy trial lawyer Michael V. Ciresi in the Democratic primary.

Though Franken left Minnesota to attend Harvard in the late 1960s and later worked for decades as a comedian in New York City, he moved back to Minnesota in 2005—in part, he has said to other news outlets, to make possible a run against Coleman.

For his announcement, Franken borrowed a page from fellow Democrat Barack H. Obama, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, by placing a video on his Web site in which he spoke about his family and explained his reasons for running.

“I’m not a typical politician—I’ve spent my career as a comedian,” Franken said in the video. “Minnesotans have a right to be skeptical about whether I’m ready for this challenge, and to wonder how seriously I would take the responsibility that I’m asking you to give me.”

Throughout the short speech, Franken made the case that middle-class families in Minnesota and elsewhere needed help, saying that they “struggle with that feeling of insecurity—the sense that things can fall apart without notice.”

“Your government should have your back,” Franken said. “That should be our mission in Washington, the one FDR gave us during another challenging time: freedom from fear.”

Franken, Harvard’s Class Day speaker in 2002 and a Shorenstein fellow in the spring of 2003, concluded the video with a quote from President Bill Clinton, saying, “There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what’s right with America, or, as I would add, by what’s right with Minnesota.”

Franken is the author of six books, three of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. The second, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” was written with the assistance of a team of Harvard College and Kennedy School students.

During his college years, Franken—who would later become one of the two founding writers for Saturday Night Live—was famously rejected from the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine.

Since January 2004, Franken has hosted a radio program on Air America, a start-up liberal network. He left the network yesterday.

Well known for his political activism and spats with conservative personalities Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, Franken’s Midwest Values political action committee raised over $1 million by the end of 2006, according to The Washington Post.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.