10 February 2019 — 1949 mst
Is Amy Klobuchar Minnesota Not-So-Nice?
Speaking at a cold Minneapolis, MN, river park as snow fell, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a centrist Democrat, and former prosecutor and corporate lawyer, today announced she’s running for President. The Minnesota Post has outstanding coverage of the event and the candidate, whose speech contained flashes of eloquence as well as cliches about building bridges.
She’s not riding high in the polls. Hamline University political scientist David Schultz, writing in the MN Post, predicts she’ll face “enormous obstacles:”
Third, Klobuchar faces a narrative problem. All candidates need a narrative or message and reason for running. Hillary Clinton’s problem both in 2008 and 2016 was that she had no narrative beyond that she was not Bush (in 2008) or Trump (2016) and it was her turn now. What is Klobuchar’s narrative? Simply being against Trump is not enough – all the Democrats running in 2020 will be that. Klobuchar needs to be more than that, and it is not clear what her narrative is — or it is one that may not play. Most of Klobuchar’s tenure as senator has been in the minority, where she has had little chance to make substantive policy in a polarized partisan environment. Her real record of accomplishment is thin.
Klobuchar’s major selling point is that she can reach across the aisle and work with Republicans. It is not clear that this is a selling point with a Democratic Party – especially during the primaries – that is moving to the left.
Klobuchar is running as a centrist and that is not where Democrats are now, and rarely has “running to the right” been a winning strategy for them at the national level. Campaigning with the endorsement of George Will does not cut it with liberals. Clinton in 2016 said her strength was going to be winning over moderate Republicans and winning white southerners (as she did against Sanders in the primaries), and look how well that strategy worked. The U.S. is even more polarized now and it is less clear that now a Democrat can garner Republican votes. Orthodoxy in the Democratic Party is now for Medicare for All, free college education, and other big idea economic redistributive ideas. Is this where Klobuchar is?
Klobuchar’s reported penchant for psychologically abusing her staff, and using members of it to perform personal chores such as picking up her dirty laundry, could undercut her attempt to present herself as the Minnesota Nice political healer who can reach across the aisle and embrace win-win deals with the most tea-soaked Republicans:
…as HuffPost reported [link added by Flathead Memo] Wednesday, concerns about how she treated her staff followed her to Washington, where her rate of staff turnover is consistently one of the highest in the Senate.
Former members of her staff told HuffPost that Klobuchar ground down morale with constant and cruel late-night emails and claimed staff was required to perform personal duties for her — such as washing dishes in her home — in violation of the Senate’s rules and federal law against personal use of the office.
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A former aide to ex-Sen. Al Franken recalled an encounter at a Veterans Day event to which Klobuchar was running late. …
A young Klobuchar staffer was sent to explain the senator’s lateness to the Franken staffer.
“I’m supposed to tell you,” she said, with a look of terror on her face, “Senator Klobuchar is late today because I am bad at my job.”
Klobuchar counters that she’s simply an employer who demands high standards, an oblique suggestion that she’s morally superior to most of her colleagues in the Senate. It would be better were she to admit she has high staff turnover because “I am bad at my job.”