From the Minnesota Post:

How the junior senator from Minnesota came to be Democrats’ No. 1 fundraiser

By Sam Brodey | 05/04/16

WHY PRESIDENT AL FRANKEN ISN’T A JOKE

Will the Minnesota senator emerge as the leader that the Democratic Party desperately needs?

BY MICHAEL KINSLEY

FEBRUARY 24, 2017 5:30 PM

But there’s one Democratic senator whom everybody knows and almost everybody likes, irrespective of party, and that’s Al Franken, of Minnesota. Franken is well known, of course, not because of his years in the Senate, but for his years on Saturday Night Live, where he often played a character named Al Franken. The character called Al Franken would occasionally say things that a Senate candidate named Al Franken would not. Nor would the Senate candidate Al Franken necessarily want every word he uttered when brainstorming with other writers on S.N.L. to become public.

Franken’s opponent in his first Senate campaign, in 2008, tried to make an issue of all this—thinking, or at least hoping, that the clean-living people of Minnesota might find the whole business a bit postmodern.

It almost worked. Franken had to go through a recount and a state Supreme Court battle before taking his seat several months late. He was comfortably re-elected in 2014.

This is Al Franken’s moment.