Franken stops in New Ulm

By KEVIN SWEENEY — Journal Editor
NEW ULM — For a professional political satirist, there’s usually nothing more satisfying than government, the more bumbling and incompetent, the better.

But Al Franken made the move this year from sniping on the sidelines to getting right in the battle with his decision to run for U.S. Senate, challenging Republican Norm Coleman.

Franken, the frontrunner for the DFL endorsement, stopped in New Ulm late Friday afternoon on a campaign tour.

“I didn’t like the direction our country was heading in, and I wanted to do something about it,” said Franken, the St. Louis Park native whose career includes writing skits and performing for Saturday Night Live, writing books that are counterpoints to conservative politician like “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations,” and “Lies, and the Lying Liars who Tell Them.” He founded a liberal talk radio network, Air America, before returning to Minnesota to take on Coleman.

Franken said he sees America slipping away from the idea that everyone should have, if not an equal chance, a fair chance to having a good life. His wife, Franni, grew up having a hard life after her father died when she was 17 months old, leaving her mother with five children.

“They made it on Social Security survivor benefits, Pell grants and the GI Bill,” said Franken. He sees the Bush administration, especially, as moving away from a government that’s on the side of the little people. Franken wants to be a senator who will work for them on issues that affect them most.

Health care is one. Franken wants to see the U.S. move to universal health coverage as soon as possible.

“Every one of the industrialized nations, except the U.S., has universal health coverage of some kind. We are the only ones who don’t have it. Other countries spend half of what we do on health care, and they get better outcomes. We have millions of people uninsured in this country, and millions more who are underinsured,” said Franken.

“I realize I’m no expert on health care, and that this will really take a long time,” said Franken. But he proposes a federal mandate that all 50 states provide health coverage for all their citizens. He doesn’t care how each state does it. He would require that insurance companies would not be able to exclude anyone for pre-existing conditions, and mandate that the plans focus on preventive care.

This approach would turn each state into a “laboratory” to test different coverage systems, said Franken, and eventually a system that works for the U.S. would be found.

“We simply have to cut health care costs,” said Franken. “It affects everyone, every facet of our society.”

On the issue of energy and rising oil prices, Franken said the situation wouldn’t be solved by short-term measures like federal gas tax holidays.

“I see this as an indictment of what we haven’t done,” said Franken. Government has been ignoring the problem for too long, he said, especially the Bush administration “and his allies in Congress, which includes Norm Coleman,” said Franken.

He accused President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of “suppressing science on global warming,” and changing reports from government agencies on environmental issues. The country has been lagging on environmental sciences, losing the advantage to other countries.

He said current U.S. policy is to give billions of dollars in subsidies to oil companies.

“We need an Apollo program in renewable energy and efficiency,” said Franken. “Like Al Gore said, there is no silver bullet, but there is silver buckshot. And those are wind, renewables, biofuel, geothermal biomass, and all the other ways of producing energy.”

Efficiency is also important, he said. “We spend 40 percent of our energy on buildings,” he said. He spent last week touring businesses in Minnesota that are building more efficient buildings and building components, and we should be building more, he said.

Transportation in this country is based on the automobile when there should be more commuter rail between cities, said Franken. The U.S. should be building more efficient cars, plug-in electric hybrids, for example, “And they should be building them in St. Paul, at the Ford plant,” he said.

Speaking on the Iraq situation, Franken said the U.S. has allowed a culture of dependency on the U.S. to grow.

“Our only leverage is to tell the Maliki government, the nations in the region and the world, that we are leaving, then start to leave,” said Franken.

It would be the only way for nations in the region and the Iraqi government to step up and start dealing with the situation, rather than relying on the U.S. presence.

“It shouldn’t be done at once, and as we leave we should convene a serious regional conference under international auspices.”

Asked about the issues of abortion and stem cell research, Franken said abortions should be “safe, legal and rare.” He said the number of abortions in the U.S. dropped during the Clinton administration when there was more emphasis on providing contraception and contraceptive information. During the Bush administration, where that emphasis changed, the decline in abortions leveled off. The economic situation hasn’t helped the abortion situation either, said Franken. “The main reason women seek abortions is that they don’t think they can take care of a child,” he said.

On stem cell research, he doesn’t think embryonic stem cell research should be banned in favor of other forms of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are still the only kind that can turn themselves into every other kind of cell, he said.

Franken said he did not see embryos as living human beings. But he posed the question - would people rather see surplus embryos that are created for in-vitro fertilization destroyed and discarded, or used for research that can save lives of children.