Is Klobuchar Too ‘Minnesota Nice’ for Democrats in 2020?

NORTHFIELD, Minn. — The speculation began the moment Sen. Amy Klobuchar walked into the room.

“You’re looking at a future president,” whispered Jacob Forman, a Carleton College senior, elbowing a friend as Klobuchar strode into a campus hall this month to rally a crowd of fired-up Democrats. Frank Wergin, a construction company owner, looked on admiringly: “That’s our 2020 presidential candidate.”

Three days later, Klobuchar coasted to a third Senate term, clobbering her Republican opponent with 60 percent of the vote in a state that President Donald Trump nearly won in 2016. Now Minnesota’s most popular politician is weighing whether her home state appeal — forged through carefully cultivated bipartisanship in Washington and an aw-shucks-I’m-just-like-you persona — will translate on a national stage.

As Democrats look ahead to 2020, Klobuchar’s presence in a jam-packed field of potential contenders raises a core question about what kind of candidate can beat Trump. At a moment when confrontational progressives such as Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are captivating the party’s imagination and tapping into its anger, do Democrats need a firebrand Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders type who can whip up the liberal left and match Trump’s pugnacity?

Or do they need a calm, reasoned, reliable (but not flashy) Democrat from the American heartland to provide a stark contrast to the president — in short, Amy Klobuchar?

“My fear for the Democratic Party is that people are going to see who can be the most virulent, anti-Trump person — and that is his game; his game is to be angry and snide,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “I think people are exhausted. I think people want to believe that we can be better than that.”

Officially, Klobuchar’s position on a White House run is that she is not commenting until she talks to her family. But she does not rule it out and has already visited the early voting state of Iowa this year. Nor does she shy away from talking about how Democrats should behave in the era of @realDonaldTrump.

“I don’t agree with, ‘When they go low, we go low,’ but I do agree that when they go low, we have to respond,” Klobuchar said, referring to the intraparty debate over Michelle Obama’s 2016 mantra: “When they go low, we go high.”

“But,” she went on, “responding doesn’t mean just going down a rabbit hole everywhere Donald Trump goes. It means doing a response but continuing to push your own agenda. I don’t think we want to use those same tactics and tweet caustic comments every morning.”

In the Senate, Klobuchar is not in the forefront on divisive issues like immigration, but she has led efforts to curb the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs, expand voting rights, address sexual harassment and protect online privacy after revelations of Facebook’s data mining.

Early in her tenure, she carved out a niche in consumer protection, shepherding passage of bipartisan bills to ban lead in toys and improve swimming pool safety after several highly publicized child deaths, measures that Gregg Peppin, a Republican strategist here, said have earned Klobuchar a derisive nickname: “The Senator of Small Things.”

“It’s issues that are kind of no-brainers, and when it comes to substantive things, she’s really not there,” Peppin said, adding that Republicans have a second nickname for her: “Cotton Candy Amy, because there’s no nutritional value; you put it in your mouth and it melts away and there’s nothing really there.”

Klobuchar has heard the “small things” criticism, and resents it.

“Not for a minute do I view these as small things,” she said sharply. “They’re big things for the people whose kids’ lives were saved.” On Capitol Hill, Klobuchar’s reputation is not all sweetness and light; she is said to be brutal to work for. A survey of senators by the website LegiStorm found that from 2001 to 2016, her office had the highest turnover, which earned her a prominent mention in a Politico article headlined “The ‘Worst Bosses’ in Congress?” (By 2017, two colleagues — John Kennedy of Louisiana and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland — had surpassed her.)

She acknowledged that she is demanding: “I have high expectations.”

But outwardly, Klobuchar is the embodiment of “Minnesota nice” — polite and intent on being able to “disagree without being disagreeable,” as she wrote in her 2015 memoir, “The Senator Next Door.” In an era of Twitter rants and senatorial showboats, she is the worker bee in the background, tallying up how many of her bills get signed into law: 24, she said, since Trump became president.

America got a taste of those traits during the contentious confirmation hearings for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. The proceedings left the Judiciary Committee’s other two possible 2020 presidential candidates, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, with political scars. Booker was widely mocked for drawing attention to what he called his “'I am Spartacus’ moment,” a defiance of committee rules on the release of private material, while Harris left people scratching their heads over tantalizing lines of questioning that seemed to lead nowhere.

In contrast, Klobuchar drew on skills honed during her years as the chief prosecutor for Minnesota’s most populous county and calmly pressed the nominee on whether he had ever blacked out while drinking. “Have you?” he shot back, to which she replied steadily, “I have no drinking problem, judge.”

Their testy exchange went viral and, in the ultimate of political distinctions, was parodied on “Saturday Night Live.” It also elevated the senator’s national profile — “I’m now getting recognized at airports,” she said — and has given fodder to allies like her fellow Minnesotan, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, who are urging her to jump into the 2020 fray.

“I think that the country is desperate for somebody that can pull us together, end this harsh partisanship and get us back on dealing with real problems. That’s Amy’s stock in trade,” Mondale said in an interview. “She’s strong, but she’s decent and just with people, as we saw in those Kavanaugh hearings.”

But while winning over independents and some centrist Republicans, as Klobuchar has done, may be an asset in a general election, it could be a hindrance in a Democratic primary dominated by the left. Although she is hardly a centrist, Klobuchar departs from progressive orthodoxy on several fronts.

She has not signed onto Sanders’ single-payer health care bill, commonly called Medicare for All; she said it “should be considered,” but prefers “a sensible transition” such as allowing people to buy into Medicare, or expanding it to cover those 55 and older. Her push to make college more affordable is not as expansive as the left would like. While she has denounced Trump’s border policies, she has not joined the movement to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

“She’s a perfectly fine Democrat,” said Adam Green, a founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, “but if we’re looking for a transformational leader and someone who’s going to elevate big, bold ideas and systemic change, others like Elizabeth Warren seem to fit the bill a little bit more head on.” Klobuchar, 58, grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs as the daughter of a schoolteacher and a prominent columnist for The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Jim Klobuchar, whose very public battle with alcoholism she spoke of while questioning Kavanaugh. She said she was simply trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist who testified that the future judge sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers.

“I was trying to find a dignified way to connect what she had said, which seemed so compelling and true, with what he had said, which was maybe he just doesn’t remember what happened,” Klobuchar said. “And I brought it up in the context of my dad, just because I was trying to explain that I know this world.”

At home in Minnesota, Klobuchar is known for her folksy style. She regaled viewers of a recent campaign video with the tale of how her high school prom date ditched her, and devoted a paragraph of her memoir to the time a boyfriend dumped her on Halloween.

“I was dressed as a Christmas tree, decked out in a green turtleneck, green tights, brown shoes and brown socks,” she wrote. “I was covered in ornaments, and I had a star attached to a ruler on top of my head.”

For the record, Klobuchar is married, to a University of Baltimore law professor named John Bessler; they have an adult daughter named Abigail who works for a New York City councilman, Keith Powers. They split their time between Washington and their home in Minneapolis.

Here in Northfield, a small city of about 20,000 people that is home to both Carleton College and St. Olaf College, Klobuchar was mobbed by fans who called her “Amy.”

Trish Beckman, a religion professor, said Klobuchar “speaks common sense in a fractured world.” Darlene Broughton, a retired psychologist who considers herself an independent, likes how the senator “maintains a presence of calmness.”

While 2020 beckons, for now, Klobuchar is still cleaning up after her re-election victory. Ever the polite Minnesotan, she said she is “still thanking people.”