When it comes to politics, Franken has always been funny. But, over the past decade or so, that humor has become more steadily fueled by outrage and sometimes, simply, rage—a simmering frustration over Franken’s belief that the nation has been degraded by the Gingrich revolution and its descendants. His books manifest his deep frustration that political speech is not more decent, more civilized, more humane. Some would say that Franken’s words—calling Limbaugh a "fat idiot," for example—contribute to that uncivil atmosphere; he would respond that he is standing up to bullies.

And this is the irony about Franken: While on the surface, he comes across a chronic joker, a man who couldn’t pass up a punchline to save his life, he is, at heart, as earnest as all those liberals for whom he speaks. This is why Al Franken can’t help but joke: because he would rather laugh than scream.

On a crisp recent Sunday morning, Franken suited up to greet several hundred supporters crammed into the Lookout Bar and Grill, a faux-chalet sports bar in Maple Grove, a northern suburb of Minneapolis. In the standing-room-only audience, Mary Harms, 57, and her father, John Dennis, an 86-year-old World War II veteran leaning on a cane, wrote Franken a check for $100. Mary, a mother and grandmother, said she was parting with the cash because “I am worried about our children’s future. I want my kids to have the chances that the rest of us had.”

Franken takes his time with Harms and her father, posing for pictures, cracking the huge grin that’s half Alfred E. Neuman and half Mardi Gras mask. Stumping at roadhouses and town halls from the north woods to the dairy farms, he’s got his views honed to centrist Democratic nuggets. On health care, for example, Franken won’t endorse a single-payer plan, even though he thinks it might be the best solution to soaring medical bills and insurance rates. Rather, he says that states should establish universal health care for children as they see fit, creating “51 laboratories” (the states plus the District of Columbia) of public policy experiments.

When the subject turns to Iraq, Franken is conservative, at least by the standards of his party’s left wing. He supports a timetable for departure, but will not say that the United States should bring its troops home at once. “There’s no good way out,” he says. “Only bad and worse.” Such carefully calibrated stands suggest that Franken’s positions may be more conservative than his comedy. And in fact, although he grew up in Minnesota, Franken matured on the Washington-New York-Boston intellectual corridor, and he counts among his brain trust inside-the-Beltway types such as Washington pundit Norm Ornstein and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr.. His other Harvard friends include columnist Michael Kinsley, writer Walter Isaacson, and diplomat Peter Galbraith. “I spend most of my professional life kicking around ideas with members of the House and Senate and Al, frankly, has a better grasp of the issues than they do,” Ornstein says.

Republicans claim to be eager to face Franken, whose past as a satirist and member of the cocaine-fueled SNL writing team—Franken has admitted to using coke in the 1980s—would seem to make him vulnerable. When Franken says something, with that grumbly, gravelly voice, the humor is obvious. But in print, his words can come across as harsh and outrageous, like something he’d fault Rush Limbaugh for saying. On The Late Show with David Letterman in October 2005, Franken joked that Karl Rove and Cheney right-hand man Scooter Libby should fear for their lives after allegedly outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. “Basically, what it looks like is going to happen is that Libby and Karl Rove are going to be executed [because] outing a CIA agent is treason,” he joked. “And I don’t know how I feel about it, because I’m basically against the death penalty.”

Such jokes make Republicans fume; Franken, they say, is at best a hypocrite and at worst unstable. On the conservative website NewsBusters, a columnist named Warner Todd Huston recently questioned Franken’s fitness for public office. “It seems that an ungovernable rage is always just under the surface with Franken,” Huston said.

Interviewed one January evening in his three-story, Minneapolis townhouse, with Franni next to him on the couch, Franken pondered whether his previous career would haunt him in a general election. “The Republicans and Coleman cynically pretend not to understand irony and other tools of satire, [such as] exaggeration and ambiguity,” he says. “They will take a joke I’ve told and say something about it that is literally true but wasn’t the point.” Franni jumps in. “Most Minnesotans are very smart! They know what a joke is. People don’t approach Al and say, ‘In 1976, you said such and such; what did you mean by that?’ They say, ‘I am losing my pension; what are you going to about that?’”

“There’s no percentage in explaining every joke I’ve ever told,” Al continues. “But I do think that people understand there’s a difference between me being a satirist and comedian and a senator. There are certain things you would say as a comedian that would be inappropriate to say as a senator, and I’m not going to say those things because it would be disrespectful to the people of Minnesota and the Senate.”

Franken can’t resist the punchline, remembering that in 2004 Vice President Cheney told Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy to “go fuck yourself.”

“I certainly wouldn’t do what Dick Cheney did to Pat Leahy,” Franken says.

The next morning, Franken will continue stumping around his home state. As he often does, he’ll talk about the simpler, happier, more civil America of his Midwestern boyhood, a time when kids looked up to their presidents—and so did the rest of the world. He gets big laughs when he tells crowds that, as he talks to college students around the country, he realizes they have “never known what it’s like to have a president who is articulate.”

The line is funny, but there’s also a sense of loss in Franken’s words that feels authentic. Speaking to the crowd at the Lookout Bar and Grill, Franken remembered, “When I was eight years old, Dwight Eisenhower was entering the last year of his presidency, and he decided to take a valedictory tour around the world—Africa, Asia, Europe—and everywhere he went, in every city, people lined the streets waving American flags.”

That is the America Al Franken believes in, and when he talks about it, he isn’t joking.

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