St Paul: Vile behaviour, said one liberal activist. Absolutely wrong, said a lawyer who votes Democratic. More proof that he does not live up to Minnesota values, said a Republican woman who voted against him.
As Minnesotans absorbed the news that their own Senator Al Franken, a Democrat, had become the latest public official to be accused of mistreating women, there was widespread condemnation of his behaviour in his home state. On Thursday, Franken apologised for an incident in 2006 in which he was accused of groping and forcibly kissing Leeann Tweeden, a radio newscaster, during a USO tour in the Middle East before he was elected to the Senate.
But many voters in Minnesota were not ready to demand Franken’s resignation, even after aiming the same call at two state legislators accused of sexual harassment this month. Some said they were trying to make sense of the details of the allegations in the context of Franken’s record as a liberal leader who had been held up as an advocate for women’s rights.
Other questions lingered too: Would there be more claims? And where did the allegation against Franken fit into the flood of sexual harassment and assault allegations launched against an array of leaders in Hollywood, politics and business?
In cafés and on Facebook pages, people here expressed outrage, and sometimes sorrow, that someone they saw as a progressive and a defender of women had behaved so offensively. They praised his record on women’s rights, especially for Native American women, a major issue in Minnesota. They reasoned that the incident was a long time ago, when Franken was a comedian and not an elected official.
“If this is a one-off, I’m willing to give him some slack,” said Barbara Kueppers, 72, a retired lawyer from Minneapolis. She also said she supported a Senate ethics hearing into Franken’s behaviour.
“Are other things going to come out?” she continued. “Many of us, both professional and non-professional women, have been subjected to unwanted touching, kissing and other boorish behaviour by our male colleagues. It’s time to end it.”
Others said they had seen this brand of behaviour from Franken before. During his Senate campaign in 2008, Republicans pointed to a column he wrote for Playboy in 2000 called “Porn-O-Rama!” that joked about visiting a sex laboratory; a sketch he proposed on Saturday Night Live in which the CBS journalist Lesley Stahl was drugged and raped; and comments at a Human Rights Campaign dinner, before he was in the Senate, that included jokes about lesbians.
“I think Sen. Franken has a track record and a history of inappropriate comments and actions,” Jennifer Carnahan, chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, said in an interview. “I think that anyone that is willing to make jokes to that level, put females in positions where they feel uncomfortable and harassed, I don’t see how you can be an advocate for women.”
Privately, some Democratic officials in Minnesota said they felt uneasy not calling for his resignation, worried that it would expose them to accusations of hypocrisy. This week, some national Democrats have publicly questioned the response at the time to Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with an intern while he was president, with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York now saying that Clinton should have resigned.
But they also tried to draw a distinction between Franken’s behaviour — which they saw as isolated — and the pervasive, long-standing patterns of sexual harassment that other elected officials were accused of.
One of Franken’s close allies, Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar, said that she “strongly” condemned his behaviour and that the Senate ethics committee should investigate it, but she has not called for him to step down. The editorial board of The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, which only days ago called for the resignations of the state legislators accused of sexual harassment, including unwanted advances and unsolicited text messages with sexual content, wrote: “Franken, so far, is accused of one incident that occurred before he took office. That does not excuse or mitigate the gravity of his conduct, which was despicable, but the story was still developing as this editorial was being written.”
On Friday, several women who had worked on Franken’s staff released a statement in his defence. “Many of us spent years working for Senator Franken in Minnesota and Washington,” the statement said. “In our time working for the senator, he treated us with the utmost respect. He valued our work and our opinions and was a champion for women both in the legislation he supported and in promoting women to leadership roles in our offices.”
A native of Minnesota, Franken ran for the Senate in 2008 after a career as an entertainer, liberal radio host and author of books with titles like “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” He is eligible to run for a third term in 2020.
