Tag Archives: Klobuchar

Your Democratic Presidential Candidate Power Rankings!

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As promised — (ok, “threatened”) — you have here the first of a new Wry Wing Politics recurring feature. Your Democratic Presidential Candidate Power Rankings. (Insert flatulent tuba sound effect.)

As briefly as possible, this is the shtick:

Candidates are given two percentage scores. One for their real world potential, based on the fact that at this point in the game most voters only really know two or three of them. (Biden, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren to a lesser degree.) Then there’s a second ranking for, shall we say, a somewhat more informed opinion (mine) of each candiate’s ability to compete with Donald Trump and his despotic allies, which is to say Russian troll farms, North Korean web hackers, Saudi bone-saw artists-cum-financiers as well as wholly corrupt and nefarious American actors like Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell and the vast, echoing right-wing sewer.

The two scores are then averaged to produce … Your WWP Pow-pow-pow-errrr Rankings!

#1: 91% / 42%. (66.5%) Joe Biden. Biden is pretty much all name recognition. Which normally counts for a lot. His “blue collar” cred — (which is baffling since the guy’s been prowling the starchiest white collar halls of DC power for what, 50 years?) — still has detectable cachet with the much-anguished over “Reagan Democrats”, i.e. white guys roughly Joe’s age in the Rust Belt. But they truly are the crowd paying very little attention at this moment. The big downside with Joe is his (very) old school judgment. From Anita Hill to the gamed-out credit card system in Delaware, Joe has forever played the give-a-lot-to-get-a-little DC influence game. The fact that he was unprepared and taken aback by Kamala Harris’s busing shots in the first debate proves again he is nowhere near nimble enough to deal with a campaign cycle already veering into shamelessly reckless histrionics and corruption.

#2: 65% / 61%. (63%) Elizabeth Warren. Less name recognition than Joe and Bernie, but a whole lot more than the bottom dozen, plus the most fully thought-out policy proposals keeps Warren high up in the rankings. She’s smart, principled and tireless. But as a performer, a bit too single-note in her (well justified) indignation and outrage. Democrats are thoroughly disgusted with Trump, but the general population tends to gravitate to candidates who they feel are “cool” and “in control” and yet still capable, even in the face of epic stupidity, corruption and racism, to crack a smile from time to time. Another demerit is, like everyone else, Warren shows no sign of having a plan for neutering Mitch McConnell. Which means her grand, laudable policy proposals are DOA.

#3: 38% / 85%. (61.5%) Kamala Harris. In my capacity as all-knowing seer, Harris checks most of the boxes required to soundly defeat Trump. Essentially, they are these: no other candidate offers as dramatic a contrast to a lazy, corrupt misogynist and bigot as a black, female former state attorney general. Her relative youthfulness also signals to Millenials and younger (75% of whom vote Democrat) that she may also be aware of and concerned with issues 20 years down the road as well as the degradation Trump has wrought today. Moreover, Harris best signals, as I’ve said before, a wiliness — a higher level of enemy recognition and preparation for the truly foul and unexpected — then almost all of the others. She knows how to play the game to win. And … I’ve seen her smile.

#4: 21% / 80%. (50.5%) Pete Buttegieg. Mayor Pete I believe is the real deal, and in a normal world, (which has never existed), a nearly ideal candidate. Someone with Buttegieg’s remarkable intelligence and thoughtful demeanor is desperately needed to guide the world through climate change and reset key fundamentals — Supreme Court, electoral college — of our gamed-out, less-than democratic order. The appeal of a (really) smart gay guy to sophgisticated urban voters may well outweigh the inevitable troglodyte bigotry of rural Trumpists. Also, of all the mano a mano debate scenarios, Buttegieg v. Really Stable Genius is the one I’d like to see most.

#5: 52% / 43%. (47.5%) Bernie Sanders. Who doesn’t love Bernie? His Medicare for All idea is wildly implausible. (Let’s imagine for a second what UnitedHealth would do if President Bernie served up a bill putting them out of business in four years.) But, as The Stranger said to Jeff Lebowski, “I like yer style, dude.” Bernie is simply too old and too easily identified (and caricatured) as a “wild-eyed Socialist”, never mind that no one accusing him of that has the faintest idea what Socialism really means in 21st century USA. And like Warren, I’ve never been able to imagine Bernie beating Mitch McConnell at anything truly devious. His light is dimming as we enter the next round of debates.

#6: 27% / 62% (44.5%) Julian Castro. A pleasant surprise in the first debates. I had forgotten how articulate the guy was in Obama’s cabinet. (Remember when cabinet officials weren’t just a pack of decrepit grifters running up fat tabs on the taxpayers’ dime?) I see no path for him to the top of the ticket, but a smart, honest Hispanic from Texas as VP? Interesting. Very Interesting.

#7: 36% / 51%. (43.5%) Cory Booker. If Barack Obama hadn’t already broken the race barrier for the Oval Office, Booker might be given more consideration. But, he just doesn’t compare all that well to Obama. Maybe it’s the New Jersey thing and having to play paddy-cake with all the Wall St. fat cats living in his suburbs, but he’s too slippery for my tastes and, ironically, not nearly as quick on his feet as Harris or Buttegieg in the face of jaw-dropping stupidity … of which there will be a superfund-sized waste dump to deal with in 2020.

#8: 18% / 44%. (31%) Amy Klobuchar. Our gal hasn’t created any forward motion for herself. Her relatively high-standing here is more a reflection of the stark inadequacies of everyone lower than she is. Her performance before the NAACP convention in Detroit this past weekend exposed a potentially fatal flaw in her record, certainly in terms of inspiring the minority vote. By oh-so carefully threading the needle between supporting cops (appeals to rurals) and acknowleding an “outrageous situation” (sorta satisfies urban voters) with regard to cop conduct, she’s got dime deep support among blacks.

#9: 11% / 36%. (23.5%) Beto O’Rourke. Is this guy still even running? Talk about a vanishing act. As the past months have gone by I’m more and more convinced that the fanatical enthusiasm for his Texas Senate race last year was all about how much people despise Ted Cruz. There should be a “lane” for a candidate speaking the lingua franca of contemporary Americanese, peppered wit readily understanable pop culture references, metaphors and aphorisms. Passionate but common verbiage, in other words. Instead, the O’Rourke of 2019 sounds like he’s had his head injected with a quart of Stepford Candidate gelatin. Dude!

#10: 6% / 36%. (21%) Michael Bennet. Bennet is actually someone you could make a case for, if he were running against, umm, Bob Dole or George W. He’s intelligent and decent. Unfortunately he is about as compelling and inspiring as a “Clean Government Now!’ leaflet handed out on a street corner. Stay in the Senate and figure out a way to publicly de-pants Mitch McConnell. (I apologize for the imagery.)

#11 9% / 25% (17%) Kirsten Gillibrand. This woman reeks of un-modulated personal ambition. Is that me, a white guy, calling a woman “pushy”? Yeah, I suppose it is. So sue me. As much as she wants to deny it, her — ambition-driven — putsch against Al Franken really is a defining factor is her campaign. It was indelible proof of what a lot of Democratic party insiders thought she was all about as she clawed her way up the party ranks in New York. Just go away.

#12: 5% / 24%. (14.5%) Jay Inslee. Agreed. Climate change should be Issue Number One. Unfortunately, until all of Trump’s Griftopia is in cinders and (here I go again) Mitch McConnell is caught in bed with a live girl AND a dead boy, the topic won’t get so much as a committee vote in the Senate. Your candidacy is futile. But by all means keeping beating the climate drum.

#13: 3% / 18%. (10.5%) Steve Bullock. Why? You’ve been a reasonably popular governor in a mountain west state (with a third the population of Brooklyn) where the majority of men like to think they’re the Marlboro man incarnate. Go back to Montana and run for Senate against Steve Daines.

#14: 2% / 13%. (7.5%) Tulsi Gabbard. Again, I’m not sure what it is she’s really after? A Senate run? The Governorship of Hawaii? Apology withstanding, her anti-LGBT rhetoric forever places her in “deep outlier” land among 21st century liberals.

#15: 2% / 10%. (6%) John Hickenlooper. What I said about Steve Bullock. Faced off against the right candidate, Cory Gardner is an easy, fat target in Colorado. Go home and get yourself elected to that job.

#16: 2% / 8%. (5%) Andrew Yang. Okay. Another book deal and speaking engagements. I get it. But beyond that, you’re part of the season’s comic relief.

#17: 1% / 6%. (3.5%) Bill DeBlasio. He has progressive bona fides. But apparently no one actually, you know, likes the guy. Other than that, the country may have maxed-out its appeal for big, self-agrandizing Manhattanites.

#18: 0% /3%. (1.5%) Tom Steyer. I’ve seen your commercials. “Impeach the moronic racist now!” (TM David Simon.) As a billionaire, your job is to keep buying TV time … for someone else.

#19: 0% / 1%. (0.5%) John Delaney. Why is anyone listening to this guy at all? Or wait, what I mean is, “Is anyone listening to this guy, at all?”

#20: 0% / 0%. (0%) Marianne Williamson. Listening to her is like what I imagine Gwyneth Paltrow would sound like as a candidate. “When I pass a flowering zucchini plant in a garden, my heart skips a beat.” (Actual Paltrow quote.) But, unlike Kirsten Gillibrand, I’d have a couple glasses of organic wine with Williamson — and not throw one in her face.

Thank you for your patience.

Klobuchar Games the Star Tribune

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Finally, this past Saturday (not Sunday if you’re paying attention) the Star Tribune published its own reporting on the controversy around Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of her staff. It included a long, comprehensive interview with Minnesota’s senior senator-turned-presidential candidate.

Oh wait. What? It didn’t? She only consented to a written statement? And they bought that?

You really should ask yourself, “How does that happen?” Arguably the most prominent elected official in the state, continuing to deal with (highly) unflattering accusations about her personal behavior, denies an interview on the topic to (without question) the state’s largest news organization … and that organization accepts that response?

It’s easy to understand Klobuchar’s goal. She wants to diminish this “bad boss” story to the point it evaporates. Later Saturday she was making jokes at the annual Gridiron Club charity dinner about eating salad with a comb. As crisis management goes, that’s good form. Get up and do some self-effacing humor about your screw-up. Every smart politician knows that strategy.

But what about the Star Tribune? Klobuchar seems to be selling the notion that, “Yeah, I’ve been tough. But that’s how I get things done.” What though is the Strib’s selling point? “Well, uh, we were shamed into devoting actual staff time to seeing if this stuff was true. But, dang it, when the Senator wouldn’t talk to us we, you know, just had to go with what we got. But by God we’re still tough, hard-nosed, call-’em-as-we-see-’em reporters and editors! Neither fear or favor, baby!”

Riiight.

To quickly review: The story of Klobuchar’s staff mistreatment broke days before her gala (snowy) presidential campaign kickoff. With startling few exceptions, no Twin Cities news organization so much as breathed a word about it, even though tales of “Amy the mean boss” have circulated in knowing circles around town for decades. When some kind of mention had to be made, the “play” was to wrap the accusations within the dismissive verbiage of “anonymous” sources and “on-line” publications, which was to say organizations with much lower standards than the Strib, or MPR.

But the story didn’t go away, and when The New York Times did its own legwork and ran the tale of the salad and the comb, the Strib seems to have found itself in a bit of a professional pickle. To the point that — two weeks after the story broke — it finally assigned a couple of reporters to, you know, see if any of this “anonymous on-line” business could possibly be true.

And what did they publish on Saturday (not on Sunday, with two to three times greater circulation)?

I quote:

“The Star Tribune interviewed four former Klobuchar staffers who all said her treatment of subordinates regularly went beyond what they considered acceptable even for a tough, demanding boss. They described similar kinds of behavior: Frequent angry outbursts over minor issues, regular criticisms and admonitions in front of others, office supplies or papers thrown in anger, cutting remarks and insults on a nearly constant basis, waking up to long strings of e-mails from Klobuchar sent late at night or in the early morning.

All shared those observations on the condition they not be named in this story, for fear of reprisal.”

Along with this admission:

“Klobuchar did not grant an interview for this story.”

Put bluntly, the problem of (presumably young) staffers fearing reprisal is not unusual for any news organization trying to report on powerful figures in politics or business. But not demanding a direct interview with Klobuchar on the festering matter is.

If the Star Tribune doesn’t have the clout — or is unwilling to exercise the clout it has — to get so prominent a public official to respond to accusations in a national story with serious consequences for her presidential aspirations, who does? And to be clear I don’t blame the reporters. This is one where either the editor-in-chief or the publisher makes a personal call and explains that funky “Who needs who more?” thing all over again.

The question then is what’s their leverage? Klobuchar knows the Star Tribune is in a position where they have to run something, given how far behind the story they are, and her bet is that again saying pretty much nothing is better than responding directly and spontaneously to specific incidents. Her strategy is all about tamping this story down and getting on with the bigger business of winning the Democratic nomination.

At the very (very) least, the Strib could devote some staff-generated column space to discussing a few of the more interesting and provocative questions that have risen up around this story. Such as whether this whole episode is purely sexist? And whether prominent women truly are being held to standards both qualitatively and quantitatively higher than their male counterparts?

The standards may be different for women, but in totality are they worse? I don’t know. But I think, given the #MeToo movement and all the women running for office, it’d be a brave and interesting discussion to engender among the public at this moment.

Sadly, I don’t foresee the Strib (or MPR) pushing this topic much further, unless again, it gets shamed into it by forces beyond our state borders.

Never Mind The New York Times, The Local Press is Still Giving Klobuchar a Pass

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How’s that old saying go? “Even a mental picture is worth 10,000 words”? In an image-conscious world there are pictures that stick in your head, pretty much obliterating, you know, balanced reasoning.

Here in Minnesota we’re very familiar with the picture of pre-Senatorial Al Franken pretending to accost the ample bosom of a sleeping colleague, a colleague who was on his USO trip largely for the thrills her ample bosom gave our fighting troops in the Middle East. Later accusations that Franken was also accosting buttocks (ample or otherwise) while taking photos with constituents of course went uninvestigated. But those charges didn’t have to be proven true. Franken’s judges and jury — here’s looking at you presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand — had the frat boy photo with the sleeping bosom.

 

That was all they really needed. Franken was guilty of, well, contempt for womanhood, to put it one way. We couldn’t think of anything more dehumanizing or revolting! What an ogre! He simply had to go!

And now we have … Amy Klobuchar eating a salad with a comb. No photographic evidence is needed. We all get the picture. A picture that invariably comes with the GIF-like image of a woman sticking a groaty comb with teetering salad in her mouth … just to spite a terrified staffer. (I still don’t buy that a U.S. airline didn’t have so much as a plastic fork on board for — for a US Senator — for a flight from South Carolina to DC.) But, whatever.

I’ve already said what I think about the not-dead-yet stories of Klobuchar mistreating her staff. (Short answer: I don’t care.) And I understand that most readers don’t give a damn about how Minnesota’s local media did — or in this case didn’t –– cover the first round of accusations against Our Favorite Senator. Likewise, I am well aware that for many women, these attacks on Klobuchar are pure sexism — women being held to different, higher standard than piggish males — period. Full stop.

But as someone who was once a member of “the media”, and who wrote about “the media” and is still intrigued by the editorial choices made by “the media”, I have to say, again, that the locals’ performance in this sideshow to the Klobuchar campaign roll-out was remarkably … weak. Or “lame”, if you prefer. And still is.

It’s one thing to play the PR homer for the local sports teams. And it’s one thing to fill half your news hole day in and day out with “Service Journalism” entertainment-irrelevancy. But when that policy is directed at an elected official strategizing for the White House, it’s just not excusable. Again … period. Full stop.

When the first accusations were thrown at Klobuchar by reporters at The Huffington Post, an attitude among the local press corps was something akin to sniffing dismissal. “The Huffington Post! Please! Since when is that real journalism! Why half their news hole every day is filled with entertainment and irrelevancy! Movie stars and cutsie-poo singers we’ve never heard of! We are Serious. We have standards! Everything on the record or we don’t run it! Anonymous sources? Not us in a billion years!”

As a result, there was practically no reference to The Huffington Post story in the days leading up to and immediately following Klobuchar’s kick-off. The “sourcing” standards at The Huffington Post simply didn’t meet the standards of The Star Tribune, or Minnesota Public Radio or the Pioneer Press or our local TV news rooms, (the primary news sources for most of us.)

There were exceptions, and good on them. But the prevailing editorial decision (likely based on the fact that literally dozens of other unimpeachably Serious news organizations, like the Boston Globe, Bloomberg News, etc. were comfortable enough with The Huffington Post’s sourcing to run the story) was to make a fleeting reference to “on-line” and “anonymous” accusations deep in the Strib’s mostly “hail and hallelujah” copy. Further, when Klobuchar finally responded to the “on-line” accusations by conceding that she can be a tough boss — because her “grit”, you understand — the matter was relegated down to nothing more than predictable reaction to a “demanding” boss.

Things changed just a wee bit this Friday when The New York Times picked up where The Huffington Post left off and did their own reporting, which churned up the story of the groaty comb and the salad. Apparently accepting that The New York Times’ sourcing standards are at least as lofty as theirs’, the Strib on Saturday ran the Times piece (not their own reporting to be sure) under the headline, “Klobuchar seen as tough boss.” (Worth noting is that the hed for on-line version was: “Former Amy Klobuchar staffers describe work environment of volatility, distrust.” I’d like to think someone in the Strib newsroom complained about that soft-core dead tree version.)

Let me repeat, I don’t care if Klobuchar rants and berates her staff or eats salads with groaty combs. That’s not why I vote for her.

But gross sexism withstanding, this was a campaign issue when The Huffington Post first reported it and is more so now that The New York Times has put its stamp on it. It matters.  It looks very much like something that could prove problematic for Klobuchar, a lot like Howard Dean’s manic yell was for him in Iowa years ago, not to mention the underlying character issue with Klobuchar is a lot more potent.

Contrary to the way the Strib, MPR and others around town hoped to play this at the get-go, the issue isn’t merely whether Klobuchar is a “demanding”, or “tough” boss, which suggests someone who yells a lot when stuff goes wrong. It’s whether she’s chronically abusive and demeaning to her staff of mostly lowly-paid young people. There’s a very big difference there.

Frankly, I’m not convinced the accusations against Klobuchar are only rank sexism. And I do think there’s an interesting conversation to be had on that question.

My point here is that the local press is still failing a basic obligation to report out a clear obstacle in Klobuchar’s campaign.