As readers of this series know, late last December I wrote a diary suggesting that one metric for sifting through the very large crowd of Democratic candidates for the 2020 POTUS nomination should be examining “broad life experience.” This is not in place of a candidate’s policy platform or assessments of “electability," or other metrics. It is simply a realization that “issues” change with events and the experiences and skills that a POTUS brings to unexpected situations (even crises) may determine said POTUS’ success or failure. So, I have been profiling each candidate as they announce looking for experience and perspective that either add or detract from a candidate’s skills either on the campaign trail or in governing.
Previous entrees in this series profiled the life experiences of Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Jay Inslee, John K. Delaney, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, and Cory Booker. Most of these profiles have been published on Fridays.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president on Sunday 10 February 2019. So, this diary is her “life experience” profile.
Early Life:
Amy Jean Klobuchar (b. 25 May 1960) was born in Plymouth, Minnesota to Rose Katherine Heuberger and James John “Jim” Klobuchar. Her mother was a public school teacher who retired from teaching second grade at age 70 and who died in February of 2017. Her father is an author, retired sportswriter and columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Amy has one sibling, a younger sister, named Beth. Her father’s grandparents were immigrants from Slovenia and her maternal grandparents were from Switzerland. Her paternal grandfather was a miner in Minnesota’s Iron Range.
Jim Klobuchar was an alcoholic whose drinking led to several arrests for driving under the influence, much time away from the family and missed family events, and eventually to her parents’ divorce when Amy was 15 and in high school. The divorce took a major toll on the family, both in terms of economics, and emotionally. Amy’s sister, Beth, dropped out of high school, left home early, and struggled for years with personal issues. Amy, herself, did not fully mend her relationship with her father until the 1990s, when he got help for his drinking. After a few years, the Klobuchar parents reconciled, but there are conflicting reports as to whether or not this meant a remarriage.
Education:
Amy Klobuchar attended public schools in Plymouth, and was her class valedictorian at Wayzata High School. I must admit to bias in favor of candidates who come from the public schools since I think they are more likely to fight for the health of public schools (although Sen. Cory Booker’s championing of Charter Schools shows that this is not automatic). I also think that, since most voters went to public schools, candidates who are themselves a product of public education can connect with voters on this common ground.
Klobuchar’s undergraduate education was at Yale University (Jonathan Edwards College). I have repeatedly described my uneasiness at the outsize role played by the universities of the Ivy League, especially Harvard (8 presidents—5 who went to Harvard College, 2 alumni from Harvard Law, & 1 POTUS MBA from Harvard Business School) and Yale (5 presidents—3 alumni of Yale College, and 2 of Yale Law), but this is not to deny that these are excellent schools which (usually) deserve their outstanding reputations. Klobuchar earned a B.A. from Yale in Political Science, magna cum laude in 1982. A second language is usually required for a B.A. from any American university, but I have searched in vain to find out what language she studied or whether she is currently fluent in any other language than English. Nor could I discover if she studied abroad or, if so, in what country and with what experience. (Maybe this will soon be posted on her campaign website, which is notably uninformative right now. It could also be in her political memoir, but I haven’t read that, yet.) We do know that she joined the Yale College Democrats and the Feminist Caucus and that she performed in the improv troupe known as “Suddenly Susan.”
Klobuchar was a Yale undergrad during the presidency of Jimmy Carter and interned with his Vice President Walter Mondale, who had been a Senator from Minnesota and who would mount his own (unsuccessful) campaign for POTUS in 1984. Klobuchar’s senior thesis was published as Uncovering the Dome and was a history of the politics surrounding the building of the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome.
After this, Klobuchar enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School, famous (or infamous) for its “law and economics” emphasis. U of C’s Law School is known for prominent conservative alumni such as Robert Bork and John Ashcroft and conservative faculty such as Richard and Eric Posner (father and son), but it has also produced several prominent progressive alumni such as Richard Cordray, Carol Mosely-Braun (first African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate), Luis Kutzner (co-founder of Amnesty International) former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and progressive faculty such as former SCOTUS Justice John Paul Stephens, current Justice Elena Kagan, Cass Sunstein, and some dude named Barack Obama as well as Diane P. Wood, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit who was on Obama’s short list for SCOTUS Justice for the seat which ultimately went to Sonia Sotomayor. I mention all this because U of C Law School’s conservative alumni and faculty have made more notoriety and I would not want someone to reach unfounded conclusions from the fact that Klobuchar is an alumna. Her record shows that she has little in common with Bork, Ashcroft or the conservative legal movement sometimes associated with U of C’s law school. (None of the current SCOTUS members, liberal or conservative, are U of Chicago Law alumni.)
Klobuchar was Associate Editor of the The University of Chicago Law Review. She received her Juris Doctor (JD, the standard law degree in the USA since the late ‘60s) in 1985. She returned to her home state of MN and passed the MN state bar the same year.
Early Career:
Initially, Klobuchar worked as a corporate lawyer. Four months after graduating law school, she joined the Minneapolis firm of Dorsey & Whitney, LLP where she specialized in telecommunications law. She made partner before leaving in 1993 for the oldest law firm in Minneapolis, Gray, Plant, Mooty, Mooty & Bennett , founded in 1866 and with offices in Minneapolis, St. Cloud, Fargo, ND, and Washington, D.C. Klobuchar joined as a partner and continued working primarily in telecommunications law. Her record in the senate has been to work for more regulation of telecommunications.
In 1994, when Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman decided to run for governor, Klobuchar filed papers to run for his seat. However, Freeman did not get the endorsement of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the MN state branch of the Democratic Party) and dropped out of the race for governor and ran for re-election as County Attorney. So Klobuchar dropped out of that race, endorsed Freeman and campaigned for his successful reelection.
Klobuchar’s political interests turned personal with the birth of her daughter in 1995. Her insurance policy, as was common across the nation at the time, kicked her out of the hospital 24 hours after giving birth. To make matters worse, little Abigail was born with a rare condition that made it impossible to swallow. For nearly two years, she had to be fed with a feeding tube. Klobuchar decided to take on the insurance companies and appeared as a witness before the MN state legislature advocating for a bill that would guarantee by law that new mothers have at least a 48 hour hospital stay. The bill passed and the Clinton administration later passed a nationwide version of the same law.
(Personal note: I first became aware of Amy Klobuchar over this struggle. My wife and I married later and our oldest daughter was also born in 1995. There were complications with her birth, but the same “drive by delivery” policy applied in KY and my wife and newborn daughter had to leave the hospital after 24 hours. There were problems I’ll omit because this is a profile of Amy Klobuchar, not my family. I do remember that things were easier in 1999 when our second daughter was born because of the new law.)
In 1998, Mike Freeman decided not to seek another term as Hennepin County Attorney. Klobuchar ran for the seat and beat her Republican opponent, Sheryl Ramstad Hvass, by less than 1% of the vote. It would be Klobuchar’s only close election. She has never lost a race.
She was a tough prosecutor and in 2002 successfully pushed for a change in MN law to allow repeated drunk driving offenders to be charged with a felony. She ran unopposed for reelection as County Attorney in 2002. In 2001, she was named “Attorney of the Year” by Minnesota Lawyer and served as president of the MN County Attorneys’Association, 2002-2003. She was a surrogate for Sen. John Kerry in MN in his 2004 campaign for President of the United States, canvassing the state repeatedly on his behalf. I do not know if decisions Klobuchar made as a prosecutor will be re-hashed in her POTUS campaign as some have been for Sen. Kamala Harris.
U. S. Senate Career:
In 2005, Klobuchar was considering a run for the state Attorney General. But when Sen. Mark Dayton (D-MN) announced that he was retiring from the U. S. Senate, Klobuchar’s mentor, former VP Walter Mondale, persuaded her, instead, to run for Dayton’s U. S. Senate seat. She did and in 2006 became the first woman elected to the U. S. Senate from MN. (Muriel Humphrey, former 2nd Lady of the U.S., was appointed to fill her husband’s unexpired term. This made her technically the first female U.S. Senator from MN, but she was never elected to office.) Klobuchar won convincingly with 58% of the vote. Her reelections in 2012 and 2018 have also been landslides—in raw votes, in percentages, and in winning nearly every county in the state each time.
Klobuchar’s tenure in the Senate has been marked by high approval ratings, by passing more legislation than any other senator, and by consistently working across the aisle, no matter the difficulty. She has persuaded extremely right wing GOPers to co-sponsor progressive legislation she has sponsored. Despite this, she has not had a national profile even though she was considered by Pres. Obama for the Supreme Court and for Attorney General.
Her reputation for “niceness” has recently taken a hit by reports of a high staff turnover rate and that she was unreasonably tough on her staff—even to the point of some claims that she had difficulty filling campaign posts for her POTUS run because of her reputation on not treating staff well. There has been some push back on these reports.
Many believe that Klobuchar, despite her currently low national profile, may be one of the strongest Democratic candidates in a general election against Donald Trump. She has never lost an election and, except for her first election, has won in landslides each time—whether the local or national mood was running for or against Democrats. She knows the crucial heartland, the upper Midwest, both the “rustbelt” cities and the rural areas. While not quite the soaring orator of Kamala Harris or Cory Booker, nor the “happy warrior” firebrand of Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, or Bernie Sanders, Klobuchar’s announcement speech in the middle of a blizzard showed that she is a compelling speaker who is both tough and hopeful—in a way that connects with many Americans in middle America. If she can show that same ability with communities of color and on the debate stage, it is easy to see a path for her to the nomination and the White House.
Think of this: Klobuchar has had a consistent “F” rating from the NRA (no change as with Kirsten Gillibrand’s switch from House to Senate), and has been very outspoken for gun safety laws in season and out—yet her approval ratings from pro-gun, pro-hunting rural “red” areas of MN is nearly as high as her approvals from the urban areas.
Personal Life:
First meeting in 1992, Amy Klobuchar is married to John D. Bessler who, despite being bald, is actually 7 years her junior (b. 1967). Bessler is an attorney and academic, currently teaching at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He is an acknowledged expert (and strong opponent) on the death penalty—including books showing that one can convincingly argue against capital punishment even using the “textualist” and “originalist” approaches to the U. S. Constitution preferred by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. When Klobuchar was elected to the Senate in ‘06, Bessler moved jobs and began to assume most of the cooking and childcare responsibilities in the home—as well as networking with spouses of other senators, so he could be well prepared to be the nation’s first “First Husband” (or whatever title we decide on). He is also an expert in international law.
The couple has one daughter, Abigail (b. 1995). Because of her medical issues as an infant, they decided against having other children. Abigail Klobuchar Bessler is currently the Legislative Director of the New York City Council and previously worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency.
Amy Klobuchar is a member of the United Church of Christ (UCC). The UCC is a liberal Protestant denomination formed in 1950 by the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church (a denomination formed by German immigrants in the 19th C.) and the Congregationalists (spiritual descendants of both the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony) which played an outsize role in early American history. It may be significant that Klobuchar is from Plymouth, MN and went to Yale (founded by Congregationalists though long since become non-sectarian) and even resided at Jonathan Edwards College (named after one of the most famous of early Congregationalist theologians). She regularly describes herself as Congregationalist. I don’t know how large a role religion has played in her life, but she spoke easily of faith in her campaign announcement speech. If it does play a large role, the nature of the UCC should reassure progressives that it would not be a regressive one. (The United Church of Christ was, for instance, the first mainline Protestant denomination to change its teaching to be fully welcoming and affirming of LGBTQ people, ordaining them without requiring celibacy and endorsing marriage equality 2 decades before it became law. They have equally progressive credentials on most other social justice issues.)
It may make agnostic, atheist, and secular Democrats uncomfortable, but the language of faith is the language of the heartland (“flyover country”). My initial opinion is that Klobuchar could genuinely speak in terms which connect and reassure heartland persons of faith (most of whom are Christian), but do so in ways that find common ground with all faiths and no particular faith toward progressive goals. There might come a time when this is not necessary in this nation, but we aren’t there. I am not saying that Klobuchar is the only candidate who can do this—I have noted similar life experiences with Warren, Harris, and Booker, for example—but my early take is that she may do this especially well.
Klobuchar’s positions are well within the mainstream of Democratic liberalism. Her approach is practical, bi-partisan whenever possible, and flexible enough to not make the perfect the enemy of the good. She stands in the tradition of “prairie populism” that produced Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Paul Wellstone, Al Franken, Tom Daschle, Tom Harkin, Dick Gephardt, and even such liberal Republicans (before that species went extinct) as Harold Stassen and “Fighting” Bob LaFollette.
I want to see more before I commit or make any endorsements. Like most of the other announced candidates, I’d like to see Klobuchar’s foreign policy spelled out in more detail. But my initial impression is very positive.
In 2015, Klobuchar published, The Senator Next Door: A Memoir From the Heartland. It is definitely on my “to read soon” list.