Mike Ciresi to Drop Out of Senate Race

(Via OpenLeft.)

A lot of people underestimate Al Franken.  They shouldn’t.

Attorney Mike Ciresi said this afternoon that he is dropping out of the race for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in Minnesota.

His decision leaves political satirist and commentator Al Franken and University of St. Thomas professor Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer as the leading Democratic candidates seeking to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

I heard some variation of the line, ‘Oh he’s just a comedian’ after the Blue Majority endorsement.  Comedy writing and performance is extremely hard and involves nuanced truth-telling.  It is in many ways the perfect training for progressive politics, since it is entirely organized around observing and articulating uncomfortable facts about ourselves in a way designed to acknowledge and empower us.

Al Franken is brilliant, hardworking, and substantive, and if I were Norm Coleman I’d be terrified.  This is a guy who wrote ‘Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot’ way before the rest of the Democratic world recognized what was going on.