That Time Al Franken Kept Telling Me Jokes About Mullets
Some vault somewhere might contain a recording of the time I went on Al Franken’s radio show, but I haven’t been able to find the episode anywhere on the internet. It aired in 2005, before the former Saturday Night Live writer and future Minnesota senator had ever made a bid for office. I’m guessing that once he decided to run, one of his handlers realized it wouldn’t be helpful to have a few years of radio comedy just sitting there for the oppo researchers to dig through. Or maybe the archive just dried up and disappeared, the way old files on the World Wide Web tend to do.
That show has been on my mind, though, because I just published an article looking back at the ways the political spectrum has been turned inside-out over the last two decades, and one of the topics I covered was that sudden burst of discussion, in 2005–06, of what might happen if the liberals and the libertarians could set aside their differences and get together for a while. Like virtually everyone else in the liberty movement, I wrote a couple of blog posts laying out my thoughts on that idea, but it wasn’t one of those that caught the eye of a libertarian-friendly producer on Franken’s staff. He got in touch because I had written a piece called “The Hippie and the Redneck Can Be Friends.” And while that particular article was about drive-in movies and country music, not partisan politics, it was close enough for radio work—Al Franken wanted to know how Democrats could appeal to freedom-loving redneck voters, and that story’s title apparently qualified me for the job.
How did the show go? I’m not sure: Like I said, I can’t find a recording, so I have to rely here on some fragmentary 19-year-old memories. I know that Franken kept making jokes about mullets. I know that I made what may have been an ill-advised allusion to my host’s bit role in Trading Places. And at some point in there, I made the point that if his party wanted libertarians to take it more seriously, it should give more than lip service to the civil liberties where Democrats were supposed to be good. It was nice, I said, to see some bloggers and radio hosts highlighting those issues, but it would be nicer if the party leadership would too.
Well, that was life in the Bush years: In 2005, the liberaltarian dream was widespread enough that someone could spot it even in an article on a completely different subject.
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