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In light of this morning's New Yorker piece, it's worth re-reading this editorial on the Al Franken scandal from his hometown newspaper. startribune.com/franken-s-apol…
That editorial is from Nov 27, 2017—about ten days after the Tweeden story surfaced, and about ten days before Franken resigned. It argued, persuasively, that Franken had not yet offered a satisfactory response to the allegations against him.
Think what you will about the position Franken and his defenders are taking now. (I think it's still incomplete and inadequate, but compelling in some important ways.) But it's not a position they took at the time.
The day before Franken resigned, three weeks after the first allegations against him emerged, I tweeted that he still hadn't come clean, and that it was impossible to even consider retaining him in office unless he did.
Franken's friends are now saying that he frequently acted like an asshole in the years in question, and that his accusers likely understood his asshole behavior as predatory asshole behavior. Okay.
But it's not Franken's critics' fault that they didn't sit on their hands forever as the accusations against him piled up (FOR THREE WEEKS!). It's Franken and his team's fault that they didn't offer a coherent public (or even, in Mayer's telling, private) account of his conduct.
Would the account Franken and his team offer in this story have saved his seat in the Senate? Maybe, maybe not. Would it have allowed him to hold on until hearings could be held? That seems more likely. But we'll never know, and that's ultimately on Franken and his people.
There are two ways Franken could have lasted long enough to get to an ethics committee hearing: Either offer an account of his behavior that would give people a reason to stick by him until the hearing happened, or refuse to resign under any circumstances. He did neither.
One last thing: Franken acknowledges that during the time these incidents are alleged to have happened he was physical with people in ways that made others uncomfortable often enough that his staff had to intervene and tell him to cut it out.
He and his supporters say this stuff was never sexually predatory, and that may well be true. But they knew it was an issue while he was running for Senate the first time.
That's exactly the kind of admission that I was referring to in the thread I linked above, as seen explicitly in this tweet:
But he made no such admission, so he gave his potential allies no basis on which to stand by him. So they didn't.
