Al Franken weighs in on Clinton's trust issues, Trump's attention span
As the presidential race tightens in the lead up to Election Day, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, leveled criticisms at Donald Trump and defended his party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton, in an interview with “CBS This Morning” early Wednesday.
Franken, who has campaigned for Clinton, said he doesn’t believe Trump could make the decisions necessary to be in the Oval Office.
“I think he’s a man with a very short attention span,” said Franken, well-known for his career as a comedian and his long stint at “Saturday Night Live.” “I don’t think he’s interested in policy.”
Clinton, on the other hand, is “the hardest, toughest person I know,” he said.
“I trust her to do the job,” Franken said. “When decisions come to the president, they’re decisions only the president can make.”
Asked about Clinton’s trust issues with voters who have little confidence in her honesty, Franken said there were several issues that factored into that.
“I think she made a mistake with the emails,” he said, but he also pinned much of the blame on the “25 years of attacks by the right.”
As a politician who has himself faced a tight race for public office, Franken acknowledged that it’s a game of voter turnout.
“I know how important turnout is, so I’m urging all my -- everyone that supports Hillary to get out and vote,” he said. “I’ve always thought this would be a close election.”
Franken, who Republicans have long derided as the deciding vote in the Senate for the Affordable Care Act, also weighed in on the President’s landmark health care legislation Wednesday, defending the public ACA exchanges just as rates in certain marketplaces have spiked.
For some Minnesotans, Franken said they “have a right to be mad for the price on the exchange.”
But he noted that a large portion of the population seeing rate hikes are also going to get subsidies through tax credits.
The senator ticked off other advantages, including getting 20 million people in the U.S. insured and the fact that the ACA has stopped Americans from getting turned down from coverage because of pre-existing conditions.
Discussing the AT&T merger with Time-Warner, Franken -- who led the Senate’s charge against Comcast’s failed attempt to buy Time Warner Cable two years ago -- slammed the “vertical integration” of the companies.
“This raises prices for consumers -- it always does,” he said of mega mergers. “This concentration - this consolidation of media is not good for consumers... and usually leads to worse service. Even worse service.”