Sole Mates

By Baxter

Okay, this shot by Brian Peterson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is really not a very good picture of Franni Franken, but we couldn't help looking at it and thinking a bit about marriage.

To wit: The newest Democratic Senator's been married for 32 years, and as far as we can tell — and we defy you to come up with contrary evidence — nobody but the woman in the photo above has ever been, in the latest incredible words of Mark Sanford, Al Franken's "soul mate."

We realize that somehow, sometime, some way, the Frankens could prove us wrong. But we'd be shocked if they did. Because, funnily enough, it always seems to be the lecturers and scolds and religious fanatics who do that, instead. (Governor Sanford, for example, is now 'fessing up to "crossing the line" with other women — "dancing with somebody else," as he put it. Hoo, boy. There's a lot more to that story, we think.)

So we'll take the Frankens, and yes, the Clintons, and the Obamas, and the Bidens, and all those other Democratic couples who, however they've conducted their lives, don't try to tell the rest of us how to live our own.