What Makes Franken Run?

Jonathan Chait has a piece in Slate about Al Franken and his run for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota which, in the wake of a possible Obama win, might just be successful.

The piece is sort of so-so until he gets to the end. Then, in my opinion, he blows it:

Franken has an infinite faith in the power of reason. Time and again, he tries to present his adverseries with detailed rebuttals and gets nowhere. One book has a small moment of triumph, in which he badgers House budget committee Chairman John Kasich into admitting that Republicans were employing a misleading measure of their plans to cut Medicare. "I took a few victory laps around the table," he writes. Franken doesn't write, however, that Kasich and his fellow Republicans continued to brandish the misleading statistic anyway.

I would guess that Franken is running for the Senate because he thinks he will have moments like these, when the superior force of his reason will carry the day. I have never seen or heard of a successful politician who thinks like this. I can't imagine he'll find politics anything but a crushing disappointment. But I'm eager to see him try.

Chait couldn't be more wrong. Franken's reasons for running for the Senate aren't reason-based. They're strictly emotional. And deeply personal.

Franken was a friend and admirer of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in 2002, only 11 days before the election that would have given him a third term in the Senate. Former Senator and Vice President Walter Mondale replaced Wellstone on the ballot at the last minute, only to be narrowly defeated by Republican Norm Coleman.

Anyone who was, as I was from its inception in 2004, a devoted listener of Franken's radio show on Air America, knows what an emotional subject this was, and is, for him. Franken's campaign, although he is too shrewd to say so, started out as a Quixotic quest to regain Paul Wellstone's seat in the Senate for the Progressives -- as well as payback for the man who would have lost that 2002 election if Wellstone had lived. At the time Franken announced, he was a longshot -- now, thanks to Barack Obama, a downturn in the economy and the worst administration in the history of the republic, he's got a real shot at winning the election and becoming, not only Wellstone's heir in the Senate, but the 60th Senator needed to supply the Democrats with a filibuster-proof liberal majority.

Somewhere, Paul Wellstone is smiling. And if Al Franken, as I hope he will, wins a week from now, expect to hear an emotional reference to Paul Wellstone from the newly elected Senator from Minnesota in his victory speech.