So far, Franken, Ciresi, and Nelson-Pallmeyer have focused their criticisms on first-term incumbent Norm Coleman, a former St. Paul mayor who ran for Senate at the urging of White House aide Karl Rove and won in the aftermath of Wellstone’s death. Recent polls have shown Coleman, who is considered a moderate Republican, in a dead heat against either Franken or Ciresi. That’s not promising for an incumbent—undecided voters tend to break toward challengers—especially with the country in an economic downturn. The DFL nominee for Senate should stand a solid chance of retaking the seat for the Democrats. Senator Franken? It just might happen.

Al Franken’s conventional political experience is, it’s fair to say, limited. At Westwood Junior High in suburban Minneapolis in the 1960s, he twice ran for class president. In the seventh grade, he won. In eighth grade, he lost to the most popular athlete in school. The defeat, Franken jokes, still hurts.

He was born in 1951 in New York City, the younger of two brothers. His mother, Phoebe, was a housewife, and his father, Joseph, worked at a toy company. In 1955 the Frankens moved to a small, southern Minnesota town named Albert Lea, where Joseph opened a quilting factory. It soon closed. His father had chosen that obscure town, Al claims, simply because “the train went through it.” Unfortunately, Franken adds, “It just didn’t stop there.” The family moved to St. Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb, where Joseph found work as a printing salesman while Phoebe became a realtor. The Frankens were Republicans until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when they became active Democrats.

Al was always a good student and, after high school, he headed back east to enroll at Harvard. An admirer of Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce, he also had a passion for comedy. In Boston, he and a friend from Minnesota, Tom Davis, wrote and performed stand-up comedy, and after they graduated in 1973, Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels hired them as writers to help launch the show. Among Franken’s more notorious sketches from the early days were “The Final Days,” a parody of the Nixon presidency, and a “Weekend Update” commentary arguing that, if the 1970s were the “Me Decade,” the 1980s would be the “Al Franken Decade.” In his singular deadpan style, Franken said that, as the new decade began, “I’ll still be thinking of me—Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me—Al Franken.”

In fact, the 1980s were challenging for Franken, who moved to L.A. and tried his hand at screenwriting and acting with little success. In the 1990s, he was back at SNL, impersonating politicians such as Pat Robertson and Paul Simon, and developing his most famous character, Stuart Smalley. The line between traditional and non-traditional political media was beginning to blur, and Franken was well–positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that convergence created. In 1988, CNN hired him to provide commentary for the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. In 1992 and 1996, he anchored Comedy Central’s election coverage, later teaming up with then-Republican Arianna Huffington, and the pair shared an Emmy nomination for Comedy Central’s Politically Incorrect in 1996.

That same year, Franken published Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, an attack on the talk-radio host who, Franken thought, served as the dishonest mouthpiece of the Republican revolution. The book became a massive bestseller, striking a chord with Democrats who felt that, at last, someone was defending them against the vociferous onslaught of right-wing media. “Don’t underestimate how much it means to have what you believe articulated really well,” says Andy Barr, Franken’s communications director. “To hear somebody saying something and feel, ‘Yes, this is what I’m trying to say.’” And Franken was fighting back not by being earnest and self-important, like an NPR commentator or a New York Times columnist. Franken was taking on the Right by being funny.

“I’m a comedian who pays a lot of attention to politics,” Franken said at the time. “I don’t know if I want to commit my career to politics. It’s tempting now, though, because this book is doing so well.” He elaborated on that temptation in Why Not Me?, a 1999 book chronicling a fake Franken run for president. That same year, Franken considered taking the job of editor in chief of George, the now-defunct political monthly, after the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. But Franken and the magazine’s publisher could not come to terms.

In the spring of 2003, Franken spent a semester as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. While there, he wrote another best seller, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Fox quickly sued Franken for trademark infringement over his use of the phrase “fair and balanced.” When a judge ruled that the lawsuit was “wholly without merit,” Franken quipped that that was also a pretty good description of Fox News. Lies also led to a heated confrontation with Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly at a book convention in May 2003, with O’Reilly calling Franken “vicious” and shouting at him to “shut up.” A year later, when Franken signed up as a host on Air America, the liberal radio network, for a reported $2 million a year, Franken continued the sparring by naming his show The O’Franken Factor.

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