It was the perfect moment for Democrats - particularly Gillibrand - to strike. President Trump endorsed Moore, and Hill Republicans were reluctant to denounce him. Moore was even banned from the local mall at one point. The Republican candidate in the race, Roy Moore, was accused of sexually abusing, assaulting, or attempting to pick up teens when he was an adult. Booting Franken was good politics for DemocratsĪt the exact moment the Franken story broke, a Democrat in an Alabama Senate special election, Doug Jones, looked like he might win. But for a set of liberals - including former Franken aides and backers, big liberal donors, remorseful senators, and some befuddled progressives who still email me about it - the case is still a live issue. The news cycle moved on to a million other things. Kirsten Gillibrand called on him to resign from the Senate, and a stream of other senators joined her he soon agreed to bow out.įor most of America, the story ended there. I’m very sorry if these women experienced that.” “I take thousands and thousands of pictures, sometimes in chaotic and crowded situations,” he said. #MeToo - Leeann Tweeden November 16, 2017įranken apologized repeatedly but said he wasn’t sure if he’d done the things he was sorry might have happened. Others recalled him trying to forcibly kiss them. They described specific, detailed incidents in which he put his hands on their behinds or breasts during photos. Seven more women accused Franken of strikingly similar, and disturbing, conduct.

Then last fall, a radio personality, Leeann Tweeden, released an 11-year-old photo of Franken smiling with his hands over her breasts as she slept wearing a flak jacket on a flight home from a USO tour in Afghanistan. Bush years, like Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - the kind of red meat (arugula?) the progressive base was eager to devour in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the conservative “war on science.” When Franken arrived in the Senate in 2009, he became an instant Hill celebrity, drawing attention in hearings for his sharp questioning and for his prowess on TV, a liberal answer to the right’s dominance on cable news. The former SNL comic wrote best-sellers during the George W. Franken’s fall was a psychic blow to liberals Democrats will need to resolve this dilemma to move forward on Franken and cases like his. But practically, when the accused is one of their own, many liberals feel turning on him unfairly holds Democrats to a higher standard than Republicans. On a meta level, liberals have embraced #MeToo as an extension of their own commitment to women’s equality. The reason liberals are stuck on Franken is because there’s a big unanswered question in the #MeToo era: What should happen to powerful men who are publicly and credibly accused of misconduct?

They don’t get why Franken is out of a job when, say, Donald Trump isn’t, or why I include Franken in stories about powerful men who’ve been accused of monstrous behavior. But most are more like the one from this weekend, written politely by genuinely confused and frustrated readers. Some of the emails are angry rockets, attacking me personally. Passing lines have inspired men to email me since December when Franken announced his resignation. In recent months, I’ve written about the intersection of gender and power, sporadically mentioning Franken. Al Franken (D-MN) speaks outside his office on Capitol Hill as he faced pressure to step down amid charges of sexual harassment on November 27, 2017. Are you getting pushback? I’m open to future articles on this point of view.” US Sen. “Ultimately, the risk is an excess of political correctness and perceived rigidity. “As a leaning progressive, I don’t see the rationale for lumping together these two men,” a man wrote to me this weekend, referring to a sentence where I put Harvey Weinstein’s name near Franken’s in a short item on Eric Schneiderman. I know this because they still email me about it. Many progressive men didn’t see the fall of Al Franken over sexual misconduct allegations as the loss of a Democratic senator.

Leann tweeten