Who Is Amy Klobuchar?

Like most of you I don’t care a whit for Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. Recently she announced her candidacy for the presidency and no one really cared. Considering how little she has accomplished, we have good reason to ignore her.

But then, the media became enthralled by her nastiness, her bad temper, her out-of-control emotional outbursts. Why, once she even ate her salad with a comb… certainly not the best use for the utensil. And certainly not the ultimate in human hygiene. It's called setting a bad example and endangering one's health to do so.

At a time when we are forced to believe that women are no more or less emotional than men, because thinking otherwise would be sexist, we have a woman who is completely out of control, who treats her staff with scorn and contempt, who is very much like a witch. Though, of course, we are not allow to use the w--- word any more.

Unhinged… would be the word that best describes Sen. Klobuchar. When it comes to executive management skills, she apparently has none. Or better, she has less than none. She is a perfect harridan in the office. She is an equal opportunity abuser and harasser.

Caitlyn Flanagan describes what its’ like working for Klobuchar:

Her problem is rage, easily uncorked, and directed not at the various forces that might thwart the needs of her constituents, but at the people—many of them young—who work for her. During Klobuchar’s first senatorial campaign, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees decried her “shameful treatment of her employees” in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office; in March of 2018, Politico reported that she had the highest staff turnover in the Senate. But it has been the recent reporting of BuzzFeed News, HuffPost, The New York Times, and others that has provided the vivid and ugly details of what apparently lies behind those facts. Although many of the staffers and former staffers provided their reports anonymously, the senator has mostly not disputed the specifics, instead seeking to frame the behavior as part of the high expectations she has of herself and her staff.

According to BuzzFeed, Klobuchar “demeaned and berated her staff almost daily, subjecting them to bouts of explosive rage and regular humiliation within the office.” The articles quote staffers alleging that in fits of anger, she threw things—including binders—in the direction of staff members, accidentally hitting an employee on at least one occasion. The accounts of her cruelty are astonishing. She once allegedly forced an employee to say to another senator’s staffer, “I’m supposed to tell you Senator Klobuchar is late today because I am bad at my job.” For Klobuchar, the dark night of the soul arrives right on schedule: She is known to fire off scathing emails to her staff between the hours of 1 and 3 o’clock in the morning.

You get the picture. In the world of abuse and harassment, Klobuchar stands out as an appalling example. Of course, if she never made a pass at any of her staff she cannot be accused of sexual harassment, but doesn’t emotional harassment count?

Unfortunately, Flanagan has marinated in the therapy culture and believes that she must seek out the root cause of this appalling bad behavior, this manifest character flaw. Naturally, she blames it on the men in Klobuchar’s life, in particular, her alcoholic grandfather and her alcoholic father. Women on their own cannot behave monstrously. We must always blame it on a man.

She writes:

Her paternal grandfather was a hard drinker: “Sometimes he drank way too much and came home in a rage, yelling at my grandma about all kinds of grievances.” In turn, he raised an alcoholic.

Her father, Jim Klobuchar, a beloved regional newspaperman, was a serious alcoholic who spoiled family events; was charged with at least three DUIs and had to write an apology to readers of the Star Tribune; and once stopped with Amy on the way home from a Vikings game and ended up drinking in the upstairs room of a bar, while the child sat alone at the bar, nursing a 7 Up and wondering when her father would come back for her. 

One of the reasons that people like Klobuchar get away with harassing and abusing the staff is that sensible people like Flanagan are at the ready to defend them, to exonerate them, to absolve them of any responsibility for their behavior.

But, calling out Klobuchar, perhaps for the first time in public, for mistreating staff does not signal sexism. Flanagan explains clearly why we tend to overlook women’s emotional outbursts. Since men are twice as strong as women their outrage is far more dangerous. It’s not sexism; it’s reality.

As dawn must follow dusk, any unpleasant revelation about a successful woman must be immediately plumbed for any possible hint of sexism, and so it has been with the Klobuchar news. If a man threw a binder at his employees, he’d be appointed president for life, is the thinking. An American city would be renamed for him; women would compete to bear him sons; his picture would be printed on currency. Certainly a kind of sexism has accompanied the incident, and the proof is that Klobuchar seems to be surviving these reports, while a man never would.

Although maybe it’s not sexism. Maybe it’s a simple recognition of the fact that men are capable of greater physical harm than women.

Of course, the usual feminist chorus has stepped forth to defend Klobuchar’s abusive behavior. Among them, Meghan McCain. She declared that the senator was tough and strong. If tough and strong means throwing tantrums and demeaning your staff, then the seriously challenged McCain has no idea what she is talking about. Klobuchar’s impotent rage is precisely that: weak and impotent. There is no virtue in being what McCain calls a "bad bitch."

The inevitable impulse to characterize this bad behavior as some kind of feminist badassery has already begun. “Being a bad bitch is a good thing,” Meghan McCain said on The View; “For me, it’s like you’re tough and you’re strong and you’re going to get things done.”

Flanagan is having none of it:

It’s shameful to humiliate and mistreat employees, no matter your gender. It’s unacceptable to be so unable to control your emotions that you throw things toward co-workers, and despicable to do it to subordinates who are afraid of you. Trying to sell cruelty and pathological behavior as a feminist victory is yet another reason that so many women who care deeply about equality don’t identify themselves as feminists.

For reasons that defy reason, Flanagan seems to believe that Klobuchar was the unsung heroine of the Kavanaugh hearings. For my part I do not even recall her intervention. In order to retain her own West Coast bona fides Flanagan trashes Brett Kavanaugh for getting angry. If someone were trying to destroy your career and your wife and your children over unsubstantiated allegations from  high school, how would you respond. If he had not gotten angry, he would have been denounced as a wimp:

But he [Kavanaugh] quickly reverted to his position of bullheadedness and verbal aggression. When she [Klobuchar] asked him—respectfully, and with generous reference to her own father’s alcoholism—about his drinking, he lost his composure, baiting her, asking about her own drinking and wanting to know whether she’d ever had a blackout. She had every reason to slap him down, but she was unflappable and gracious. After a recess following the exchange, Kavanaugh defied Trump, who had recommended that he axe-kick his way into the Supreme Court, and did something remarkable: He apologized to her.

Obviously, Flanagan must denounce the Trump administration. Otherwise, no more West Coast cocktail parties. So she expresses great admiration for Klobuchar's mediocre performance, while missing the best performance of the Kavanaugh nomination.

She writes:

Amy Klobuchar interrupted Trump’s carny politics with something entirely opposite to them, something that called to mind the old virtues: character and decency. 

In truth, the one senator who showed true character and decency during the Kavanaugh hearings was Sen. Susan Collins. But, she cannot be recognized because she voted for the nominee. In Flanagan’s mind, good character means voting against Trump. And besides, a woman who shows no character in private is seriously unlikely to show it in public. Klobuchar did not rise about her character flaws. She hid them well enough to dupe a gullible writer.