He's Not Joking by Joshua Green
The Atlantic, May 2008
“Franken has become a good enough campaigner that it’s easy to lose sight of just how audacious a move he’s trying to make. A little more than a year ago, he was playing radio characters like ‘Liam the Loose-Boweled Leprechaun’; a year hence, he could be a sitting U.S. senator. It’s enough to make Bill O’Reilly’s head explode. But Franken doesn’t see it this way. ‘A satirist looks at a situation and sees the inconsistencies and hypocrisies, and he cuts through the baloney and gets to the truth,’ he often says when confronted by skeptics. ‘I think that’s pretty good training for the Senate, don’t you?’”  
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Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, a former senior editor at The Atlantic, is now a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine.