Courting the Democrats: Franken, Ciresi

By Mark Fischenich
The Free Press

MANKATO November 18, 2007 12:59 am

— The 2008 election is now less than a year away.
In Minnesota — just below the presidential race in the battle for voters’ attention, TV stations’ advertising slots and donors’ money — will be the campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Norm Coleman.
Coleman is running for a second term and is a lock to the be Republican nominee. Who his Democratic opponent will be is partly being decided now.
Front-runners Al Franken and Mike Ciresi and a pair of lesser-known candidates — Jim Cohen and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer — are attempting to identify Democrats who are likely to be delegates at June’s DFL State Convention. With all four pledging to abide by the wishes of the delegates, only the endorsed candidate is expected to continue on to the general election against Coleman.
“It’s like you fight for every blade of grass,” Ciresi said of the struggle to win the most delegates.
While about 1,400 delegates will decide who to endorse, tens of thousands of Democrats will begin the process of picking the 1,400 during precinct caucuses Feb.5.
So while the candidates are focused on party activists for the time being, Ciresi (last week) and Franken (last month) gave a sample of what they’re telling Minnesota Democrats during the courting process.
Al Franken: A familiar face with a serious side
Al Franken, doing a 9 a.m. interview in the student union at Minnesota State University, mentioned that many Minnesotans aren’t yet interested in the 2008 race for U.S. Senate.
“You get the sense that a lot of people are so frustrated with politics they don’t want to talk about it and aren’t paying attention,” he said.
Other Americans are caught up in “an entertainment stupor,” distracted by other pop-culture diversions. Franken maintains he has a unique ability to reach those people.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” a woman says, walking up to Franken’s table near Jazzman’s coffee bar, “but I have a friend who’s a really big fan of yours. ...’”
Franken gets her name and the friend’s name and, along with the requested autograph, writes a note. Whatever the note says, it makes her laugh and she leaves smiling.
“Then there are people who just understandably feel they’re not part of the process — that they don’t really have a say,” Franken says, getting back to the interview.
He runs through a long list of special interests that have much more influence in Washington than do average Americans: big financial interests, big pharmaceutical companies, big insurance firms, big oil, big media ...
It will take someone other than the standard candidate to get people to believe that America’s course can be changed, that hope can be restored, Franken said. He’s confident Democratic activists, the ones who will be endorsing a candidate in June to run against Coleman, are deciding he’s the guy.
“People are looking at me and thinking if they want to win the election, they want somebody to get excited about and that all Minnesotans can get excited about,” he said. “... I clearly connect to people and relate to people.”
As the biggest name among the Democratic candidates, Franken has already been targeted by the state Republican Party and conservative bloggers. Culling quotations from his books, national radio show, speeches and interviews, they found more than a few harsh comments, sometimes including vulgarities, made about various Republican officials.
They also portray Franken — who has received financial support from famous folks he met while working in the entertainment industry — as the candidate of Hollywood liberals instead of average Minnesotans.
Franken said when he talks with Minnesotans about his background and his ideas, the Republican attempts to define him quickly crumble.
He’s not talking about the well-known stuff: his work as a writer and occasional performer on “Saturday Night Live,” his book-writing (including the No. 1 bestseller “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot”) or his show on the liberal talk-radio network Air America.
He’s talking about moving with his family at the age of 4 to Albert Lea and two years later to St. Louis Park; about his middle-class youth, living in a two-bedroom house with his parents and brother; about earning admission to Harvard University after graduating from high school.
Franken notes he and his wife, Franni, have been married for 32 years and have raised two sons. And he emphasizes his seven USO tours to entertain American soldiers, including four trips to Iraq.
“When my life and my views start to take shape for people, it doesn’t conform to the Republican stereotype that the Republicans are desperate to put out,” he said. “They start to listen to my stance on issues. And they agree with me.”
Health care is the first issue he brings up. He supports universal health care while setting up a test case for an American version of the single-payer system used in most Western countries. Franken would like to see the federal government require states to implement universal health care coverage, giving them the freedom to use whatever combination of market-based and government-controlled strategies they like.
He would require a single-payer system for kids, a fair way to examine whether that system will be accepted by the broader population, he said.
Asked about issues ranging from the federal deficit to problems with the Social Security to immigration, Franken gives earnest, detailed answers. There are occasional jokes, but he wants it to be clear he’s serious about representing Minnesota in the U.S. Senate.
He remembers his youth in St. Louis Park in the 1950s and 1960s, when people were optimistic about the future and America was “going gangbusters.”
“We can do that again. We can be that America again,” he said. “We can start to turn this around now.”
Mike Ciresi: Trial lawyer focusing on the future
Mike Ciresi doesn’t claim to be the funniest candidate in the race for the Democratic endorsement for U.S. Senate, but he does claim Al Franken once stole one of his jokes.
“It was the morning that the president had his colonoscopy,” Ciresi said. “I won’t say any more than that, but it was a good one.”
The two leading candidates for the endorsement had back-to-back public events, and Ciresi told his joke at the first — only to hear Franken tell it at the second.
“That’s OK. Fair play,” Ciresi said. “We laughed (about it).”
Ciresi isn’t planning to try to match Franken’s ability to amuse Minnesotans even as he promises to win the popularity contest among the Democratic delegates who will endorse a candidate late in the spring. The millionaire trial lawyer is convinced those delegates are looking for a candidate who mirrors what he has to offer.
“The critical issues I’ve heard from a lot of conversations are electability and who can get things done,” he said. “People are really desperate for that. ... They want to know who can beat Coleman and who can get things done.”
And they want to know about Iraq. While Franken initially supported the war, he has joined Ciresi in strongly opposing the war and the actions of the Bush administration in the lead-up to the fighting and in the handling of the occupation.
Ciresi calls for a Middle Eastern peace conference involving all countries that have a stake in the outcome of the Iraq War. Both candidates support beginning a troop withdrawal and want to see the troops entirely removed from combat operations in Iraq over time.
Ciresi doesn’t bring up Franken’s name a lot. But when he talks about his own attributes as a candidate, they seem to target a particular candidate who lived most of his adulthood far from middle America and spent his career mainly trying to entertain.
“I’ve been here all my life,” Ciresi said.
As an attorney, he said he’s represented everyone from individuals to unions to the state of Minnesota against powerful interests that had done wrong to his clients — companies that manufactured the defective and sometimes lethal Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, that operated the deadly chemical plant in Bhopal, India; that attempted to market cigarettes to young people.
He used a portion of his firm’s share of the $6 billion tobacco settlement he won for the state of Minnesota to set up a foundation that promotes education, public health and social justice.
Central to Ciresi’s campaign is creating a better future for the middle class.
“They’re getting squeezed to death,” he said, mentioning rising health care costs, disappearing pension benefits and eroded wages.
He talks about parents feeling like they never have enough time for their children because they’re forced to work two or more jobs to make ends meet. He bemoans the massive debt middle-class college students must carry with them for decades after they graduate.
Ciresi said there’s no way to know who the person is that can make the next world-changing contribution to society, who the person might be with the unique gifts to discover a cure for cancer.
“She could come from the poorest home or the wealthiest home. But I do know this: If we can create the opportunity for everyone to reach their full potential, we’ll all be better off,” he said. “That for me is the proper role for the federal government.”
To get there, Ciresi wants to make health care a right rather than a luxury, reform the tax code to make it simpler and fairer for people with average incomes, invest in higher education while eliminating President Bush’s No Child Left Behind school reforms.
He talks in detail about most of the issues. His health care plan is similar to those being offered by Democratic presidential candidates — supporting universal health care, but not a single-payer system. He calls for lower-interest college loans, more Pell Grants and a loan forgiveness program for graduates who agree to fill desperately needed jobs such as serving as a nurse or doctor in rural hospitals.
Ciresi said there’s an easy explanation for why he — a millionaire lawyer — is focused on the needs of the middle class. Cisesi’s mother died of breast cancer when he was a child and his father had a seventh-grade education and ran a grocery store where Ciresi worked stocking shelves and sweeping floors.
His father sent him to St. Thomas Academy and The College of St. Thomas.
“He told me, ‘You work hard, get an education, remember that you have to give back to the common good, you’ll have a better life in America than I did,” Ciresi said. “Today, we’re hard-pressed to tell our kids the same thing.”
The others: Hoping for a victory from behind
Al Franken and Mike Ciresi have the big names and the big money in the contest for the DFL endorsement to run against Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in next year’s general election. But two other candidates are hoping to pull off a come-from-behind victory at June’s endorsing convention.
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is in an instructor in peace and justice studies at the University of St. Thomas and has a long history of working on programs that attempt to alleviate hunger and poverty. More details about his life, his ideas and his campaign are available at Jackforsenate.org.
Jim Cohen is a lawyer and environmental activist who worked in consumer protection for the Federal Trade Commission prior to moving to Minneapolis in 1994. His campaign Web site is jimcohenforsenate.com.
Dick Franson, who also has announced he’s running as a Democrat in the Senate race, has made numerous unsuccessful runs for a variety of offices in recent decades. Franson doesn’t have a campaign Web site.

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