My thoughts go both ways on the now junior senator-elect from Minnesota:
On the one hand: I’m always skeptical of entertainers turning into politicians. I guess I wonder how their life and work has prepared them for government leadership. It comes to this, I think: I just went to Wikipedia and (literally) randomly selected a sitting senator, and took a peek at his background prior to the Senate. As it happens, I picked Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Grassley served for fifteen years in the Iowa House of Representatives, and then three terms in the United States House of Representatives, before he took his seat in the U.S. Senate. Franken will take office having served… as a writer and blogger, primarily.
To be fair, though: Franken did graduate cum laude from Harvard with a degree in Political Science, and he recently served as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He’s not entirely a novice. But still.
And yet: I’m flabbergasted by the hue and cry from Republicans over Franken’s victory. They paint him as a lightweight, view his election as evidence of just how shallow Democrats are. This from the party of actors Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sonny Bono; the party of football heroes Jack Kemp, Tom Osborne, Steve Largent, and J.C. Watts; and (most pointedly) the party that is in love with small-town mayor Sarah Palin. I would think that Republicans would be particularly sensitive to the notion that preparation can come from all kinds of places. Kemp, Reagan and Watts, particularly, have shown themselves to be worthy of the calling, despite fairly light preparations for their initial forays into politics. (Kemp, in particular, is probably instructive in terms of what we can expect from Franken. Both of them were always interested in politics, always Beltway junkies. Franken can only hope to have as much influence as Kemp did.)
In a nutshell, Republicans: I sort of agree. But I don’t think I want the lecture to come from you.
