Wednesday, 11 April 2012
This afternoon, Senator Al Franken visited my place of empoyment. The event was billed as a town hall meeting.
After beginning 15 minutes late (wow…that’s a lot of lost productivity for the 500+ people in attendance), Franken began by offering a few remarks. He was an absoltuely terrible speaker. I haven’t heard many politicians speak in person, but I was pretty much embarrassed for him the entire time. I think he said the word “um” six times in a row at one point, and I’m not sure he ever constructed a proper sentence during the 15 minute “presentation”. This is all the more odd considering he used to be a writer, and occassional actor, on Saturday Night Live, so I would think his ability to both construct sentences and speak extemporaneously would be exemplarary.
During the next 15 minutes, during which time he answered all of 4 questions, he performed much better. I enjoyed his answers, and his humor.
A co-worker later said that he’s heard Franken speak before and he’s usually much more deft and witty.
Thursday, 12 April 2012
This morning, in class, documentary film-maker Mick Caouette visited our class.
He showed us about 45 minutes of his film The Art of Possible. The film, which aired on PBS recently, details the public life of Hubert Humphrey.
Here’s the most interesting thing I got from the documentary: In the fall of 1968, Humphrey succeeded in closing a 20% gap between he and Nixon in the polls, leaving the Presidential election in a dead-heat. In the final days before the election, President Johnson finally succeeded in getting North and South Vietnam to meet him at the peace table in Paris (it probably helped that Johnson finally agreed to stop bombing all those red Commie farmers and children). This, of course, boded well for Humphrey – who was Vice Prez at the time.
However, Nixon secretly contacted the South Vietnamese government and encouraged them to hold off negotiations until he won the election, since he would be able to get them a better deal. The South then called off the Paris Peace Talks mere hours before the election was to begin. Nixon won the election with less than a 0.5% margin of victory. The war lasted seven more years and caused 25,000 more deaths. All that’s too bad, of course, but the important thin is, Nixon won, and the country enjoyed five and-a-half years of Tricky Dick.
Afterward, we had a question-and-answer session, which certainly made yesterday’s “town hall” forum seem like even more of a joke.
I well remember the Humphrey / Nixon Election. The phrase at the time was “Dick Nixon before he can dick you.” I am sure the Vietnamese could attest to that.
I am surprised by Al’s poor showing at your work. He must have been having a bad day. I have read of couple of his books which were excellent.
Love that slogan, Mike. In our history book for class, I read that some war protestors held signs that said, “Vietnam: LBJ should pull out like his dad should have.”
Yeah, the general consensus at work is that Franken gave an absolutely lousy speech. In a recent meeting, a few conservatives were ripping on his speech, and I felt compelled to say that his message was, in fact, interesting and I agreed with it, but his delivery sucked. One of my co-workers said he’s seen Franken speak a few times, and normally he’s articulate and witty…so he must’ve been having an off day. I don’t know how anyone could last long in the political arena if they consistently spoke as poorly as he did.