Pro-Franken pushback
It’s no surprise that I’ve gotten some pushback on my Franken Should Resign post (mostly via messages sent to my private email). Three people took me to task for being unnecessarily harsh. In case you missed it, here’s my previous borderline-harsh post:
I get what they’re saying, although I’m not in complete agreement. Let me make as crystal clear as I can, I am not denouncing Al Franken the person. As I said, I like him, I admire him, and I’m very grateful for his service in the Senate. He made a few mistakes, but the mistakes didn’t cross more than a centimeter into the dark zone of exploitation of women. Whereas Roy Moore has gone so far into the dark zone he has become invisible to anyone seeking decency.. He has shown no contrition; on the contrary, he has attacked and gotten surrogates to humiliate his accusers, of whom there’s little doubt that they are telling the truth. You can’t get a lot less Christian than that. (That Donald Trump has failed to denounce him speaks still more volumes about the fundamental indecency of our so-called national leader.)
Oh, the Ambivalence.
To my mind, I was not attacking Al Franken for being bad. He did some stupid things and chauvinistic things he ought not to have done. I was saying, in the context of our current political atmosphere, and in the context of the stature of the Democratic party as a whole, it would be best for the Party, and particularly the liberal wing where I usually stand, for him to resign. Yes I was “harsh,” but I feel respectfully harsh, as opposed to the hyperbolic, transparently partisan comments coming from the political Right.
As a nod toward political pragmatism, I hope he can hang in there through the current legislative session, when there is so much at stake for our country and the world. I think his offering to resign as of January 1 would be a pragmatic compromise. Minnesota has a Democratic governor, and one would hope he could name a replacement that would carry on the Party cause, although he or she could not be as effective as Franken has been, at least until he or she has learned the Senate ropes.
Believe me, I’m on a very narrow fence here. I am so ambivalent about Franken resigning that I can almost say my decision was almost a kind of mental coin toss.
Right/Left Bias: do we fall too easily into a partisan trap?
Here’s the problem: how can we liberals separate our evaluation of Franken the man from Franken the left wing politician? I watch MSNBC and often cringe when I see bias such as Rachel Maddow demonstrates. I’ve wondered, do I do that? I’ve watched her take a pejorative speculation about a politician on the political right and state it as fact. That’s not journalism It doesn’t matter if the speculation hits close to what we’re pretty certain is the truth. It is still, dare I say it(?), fake news. I am suspicious of my own tendency to see political issues and politicians through a partisan prism.
The only Fox News commentator I could ever watch for more than five minutes at a time was Meghan Kelly (OK, she’s very easy on the eye, but that’s only part of it), now moved to more neutral news territory. And there were times that I found myself agreeing with her. She was closer to center, and more objective, than anyone else on Fox. At times I saw her skewer a target on the political right with the same arch banter she used against targets on the left. But I couldn’t follow her regularly because of her lean to the right, and I had to question myself, was that sufficient reason to ignore Meghan Kelly?
So, there’s unconscious bias I’m not aware of, as well as the conscious political bias I bear because I’m sure the Left is so much often correct than the Right.
Am I overcompensating in the case of Al Franken? Maybe someday I’ll figure it out. 🙂
Controversy on the Left has been appropriately muted. I have been moved by the testimony of many women (cited on MSNBC last Friday) who have either known Franken a long time, or have worked with him or under him, and they have jointly and severally asserted that he has, in addition to promoting a feminist agenda, acted all along as, in the words of one, “a perfect gentleman.”
Moreover, this column by Jill Abramson in the Guardian articulates the controversy perfectly, to include “mitigating circumstances” part of which are political: Abramson on Franken
Abramson, attending to nuances as befits an even-handed pundit, seems to be a fence-straddler also, at least in public, as of Sunday night. She ranges through a complex field of issues, present and historical, without personally committing. Maybe I should have been so wise. But I stick with my position. We cannot compare our man with Roy Moore. Moore is beyond the pale; he is beneath comparisons. I think it is for the best for the Democratic Party to hew to a higher standard. Even when it hurts.