How a Rich Kid Politician Was Spun as a Working Class 'Oysterman'

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75. Democratic Reawakening: With Al Franken's resignation, Democrats are holding their politics accountable to their values

By John Stoehr

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2017-12-12/sexual-misconduct-reckoning-is-opportunity-for-democrats-to-reinvigorate

Dec. 12, 2017

Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., leaves the Capitol after speaking on the Senate floor, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Franken said he will resign from the Senate in coming weeks following a wave of sexual misconduct allegations and a collapse of support from his Democratic colleagues, a swift political fall for a once-rising Democratic star. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

I lost count of the number of people last week who said, with the air of arch authority, that the Democrats were playing a sucker's game in pressing U.S. Sen. Al Franken to resign. "This is why Democrats lose," some left-liberals said while anti-Trump independents said, "This is why I am not a Democrat." The complaint is that the GOP would never eject one of its own over sexual misconduct, so why should the Democrats? Typical, critics said. The Democrats choose purity over politics.

Some people can't see that Franken's resignation stems from values as well as politics. The Democrats are signaling to every women who ever faced sexual discrimination (which is a lot) that the party is their home, and they are creating conditions in which President Trump's past lechery has the potential to be as threatening to him as past entanglements with Russia. U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the leading Democrat in the Franken purge, said Monday he should resign.

Will Gillibrand's call amount to anything? I have no idea. Given what Trump and the Republicans are willing to do to secure Judge Roy Moore's victory in Tuesday's Senate election in Alabama, I doubt it. But achieving concrete results is only part of the reason for political parties. They exist to provide, as clearly as possible, an expression of the principles they believe serve a majority of Americans in their particular time and place. In this post-Harvey Weinstein moment of reckoning, the Democrats are building a platform from which to say: Freedom is your destiny in the 21st century, and our brand of liberalism is the means of achieving that fate.

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I suspect the women driving this moment of reckoning with no end in sight have heard Edsall's reasoning a few times. I suspect they know a thing or two about not speaking up about the man in charge for fear of retaliation. If these women took Edsall's flawed reasoning to heart, we would not be witnessing this renewed liberal moment. Thank God, they didn't.

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