Two months after taking office as Hennepin County Attorney in 1999, Amy Klobuchar rearranged the furniture in the office’s reception area. The next day, the furniture had been moved back.
Klobuchar moved the furniture again. Someone moved it back. Klobuchar moved it again. One staffer told Klobuchar that the rest of the office liked the office’s original layout and many felt that Klobuchar’s new office arrangement caused a tripping hazard.
“I was immovable. The furniture would stay where it was. And for the record, I note that during my eight years as county attorney, no one tripped and fell due to the new furniture arrangement. Everyone got used to it,” Klobuchar said.
If you think this is an unflattering story told by anonymous sources, illustrating Klobuchar’s penchant for micromanaging and misplaced, obsessive priorities, you’d be wrong.
The story comes from Klobuchar’s own 2015 memoir, The Senator Next Door: A Memoir from the Heartland.
Rarely has a candidate for Minnesota governor spilled so many words about herself as Klobuchar, who is the author of two memoirs, the latest about her 2020 presidential run and governing during the pandemic. Klobuchar has also spent decades building her own brand to become one of the state’s most recognizable figures.
Time and again, Klobuchar — unlike her more private opponent, GOP nominee Lisa Demuth — is willing to share details that expose an almost perfect self-awareness. Her senior-year prom date ditched her because she refused to dance with him in the Ridgedale Mall fountain, lest she ruin her pink polyester dress. A boyfriend once broke up with her prior to a Halloween party while she was dressed as a Christmas tree — he may even be one of the exes who donated $17,000 to her first U.S. Senate campaign. She kept track.
Even when Klobuchar has sought to keep matters hidden, as in the case of reports of her tyrannical behavior toward her staff, the details are now well-known following the intense national scrutiny of her presidential campaign.
Despite her place as one of the most-talked-about and written-about Minnesotans in state history, voters will still have to decide if Klobuchar is a demanding boss who gets the best out of talented people, or a bully who will struggle to oversee 50,000 state employees; an ideologically malleable problem-solver, or an opportunist lacking any core principles; a model public servant, or a climber looking for one final bullet point on a resume that runs pages long.
Contributed
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Nicole Neri / Minnesota Reformer | 
Lorie Shaull
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KAXE |
A childhood steeped in politics
Klobuchar’s daughter, Abigail, was born in 1995 without the ability to swallow, and Klobuchar was discharged while Abigail stayed in the hospital to receive care. Disgusted by this treatment of a fragile new mom, Klobuchar organized fellow young mothers to lobby the Minnesota Legislature and got a bill passed to mandate a 48-hour hospital stay for mothers. President Bill Clinton later signed a similar federal mandate.
Although she has often presented this as a kind of political origin story, Klobuchar was actually steeped in politics growing up.
As a child, Klobuchar took messages from political leaders when they called the home phone hoping to talk to her dad, a reporter and columnist for the Star Tribune who often wrote about the downtrodden.
Klobuchar’s mother, a second-grade teacher and a member of the union, saved a message the 8-year-old Klobuchar took down for her dad: “Call callect, Jhon Heritage with the Vice Prestint. All they wanted to know if he’d be with VP in Detrit,” Klobuchar wrote in her 2015 memoir, explaining that her 2nd-grade self made a note to her dad that he was supposed to call John with the vice president’s office if he planned to join them in Detroit.
In junior high and high school, Klobuchar door-knocked for several state legislative races. After graduating as the valedictorian of Wayzata High School, her interest in politics took off at Yale and deepened when she wrote her 215-page senior-year thesis about the politics behind building the Metrodome, the predecessor to U.S. Bank Stadium. It was later turned into a book. Klobuchar spent hours interviewing legislators and business leaders about how the stadium was financed and built.
After her sophomore year in college, Klobuchar interned for Vice President Walter Mondale in 1980, the last year of the Carter-Mondale administration. Mondale would become a mentor to Klobuchar, working with her in the private sector. He attended her wedding and made a speech at the reception — held at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs (of course).
Klobuchar went to a prestigious law school — the University of Chicago — because, she said, it was the route to politics for the Minnesota political figures she admired.
“I had seen inspirational public figures like Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale stand up for the people of our state and our country. I believed that becoming a lawyer would help me do the same thing,” Klobuchar wrote.
After graduating she started at the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney, which would later become Mondale’s firm. Klobuchar carved a niche for herself representing telecommunications companies.
While moving up the ranks of Big Law, she organized events for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Mondale introduced her to Clinton.
It was a heady time for Democrats after the disastrous Reagan-Bush years. Sen. Paul Wellstone won a Senate race in 1990 with a folksy, grassroots campaign. Bill Clinton won two years later.
In retrospect, Klobuchar absorbed the lessons of Wellstone’s relentless campaigning across Minnesota. She hits all 87 counties every year.
But her politics seem to have been more influenced by Clinton, who sloughed off the old Democratic leftists, highlighted small but popular issues and made Republican themes his own, from tax cuts to welfare reform to a more aggressive posture toward crime, which soared during the 1980s and early 1990s.
It was never clear whether Clinton believed in what he was selling, but the point was that Democrats would never again lose 49 states as with Mondale in 1984.
In the past few weeks of her gubernatorial campaign alone, Klobuchar has said she’d avoid tax increases, form a regional anti-gang task force and root out fraud where fellow Democrat Gov. Tim Walz failed.
Child of an alcoholic
This life of professional success and powerful friends may sound privileged, but she carried around baggage from her childhood.
Klobuchar often talks about her father, Jim Klobuchar, and to this day will bring him up in policy discussions.
In her first debate with Demuth earlier this week, Klobuchar evoked one of her father’s 23 books — Will the Vikings Ever Win the Super Bowl — when asked about granting professional teams tax breaks for new arenas. (In typical Klobuchar-ian fashion, she managed to be on both sides of the issue: She wouldn’t want to lose our teams, but she doesn’t want taxpayers to get “hosed.”)
Klobuchar said she was largely unaware of her father’s alcohol use disorder until she was 12 years old. She and her father stopped at a bar in Minneapolis after a Vikings game. He drank with his friend upstairs, while the young Klobuchar sat at the bar drinking a 7 UP. On the way to their home in Plymouth, Klobuchar said her father weaved across Highway 55, and he crashed into a snowbank near their house.
“When the police came, they let him go home and that was the end of it. But I was scared. He told me he was sorry and that he would never do it again. I remember he cried,” Klobuchar wrote in her 2015 memoir.
Klobuchar’s parents got divorced when she was 15, and she was so upset she grabbed her coat and ran away from home for the first time to a nearby friend’s house. The divorce was amicable, but Klobuchar, who has a younger sister, took on the role of caretaker for her father.
“I was the oldest kid. I felt like I wanted to make it better, and so that was part of what I thought was my job because I wanted him to be able to not hurt himself or hurt someone else, but also so that he could get in a better place,” Klobuchar said in an interview with the Reformer.
Children of alcoholics often pick up on the fact their parents aren’t fully present, which can cause hypervigilance, i.e., the child is on high-alert and embraces perfectionism, said Brianna Hardcastle, a clinical director at a mental health treatment center in Florida whose own father died of alcohol use disorder.
Hardcastle said children of alcoholics can be high-achievers, so she wasn’t surprised to learn that Klobuchar, who served in the U.S. Senate for 20 years, is the child of an alcoholic.
That high-achieving perfectionism isn’t without cost, however, as legions of Klobuchar underlings would learn, sometimes viscerally.
Klobuchar the prosecutor
Klobuchar won her race for Hennepin County Attorney in 1998 and came into office with a 48-page leadership plan, which included aggressive enforcement of a new law imposing a five-year minimum sentence for felons who possess guns; lobbying the Minnesota Legislature to pass a law granting prosecutors the final word in closing arguments in criminal trials; and better coordination with the county’s more than 30 police chiefs.
Klobuchar’s tenure as county attorney was known for stiffer sentences, more criminal trials and more convictions.
That record came under scrutiny during her 2020 presidential campaign, when doubts were raised about the conviction of Myon Burrell in the killing of 11-year-old Tyesha Edwards, who was struck by a stray bullet while doing homework at her dining room table in 2002. At the time of the incident, Burrell was 16.
Klobuchar long touted Burrell’s conviction, and Edwards’ mother appeared in a campaign ad for Klobuchar’s first Senate run in 2006.
Klobuchar in her memoir called Edwards’ mother’s statement the “most touching”: “When our little girl Tyesha was murdered, Amy made sure that those gang members went away,” Edwards’ mother said.
But the prosecution was problematic: It relied substantially on jailhouse informants who had an incentive to lie and lacked physical evidence. Klobuchar eventually called for an independent investigation into Burrell’s conviction. The state commuted his life-sentence in 2020. A commutation does not affect a person’s conviction but only reduces their prison sentence.
While Hennepin County Attorney, Klobuchar’s poor treatment of staff began to leak, which would become a theme for the next quarter century.
Jim Appleby, an assistant Hennepin County attorney and president of the local union, wrote to AFSCME Council 5 leadership asking that they refrain from endorsing Klobuchar’s first Senate campaign because of how she treated her staff.
“Amy Klobuchar has demonstrated her disdain for the very employees that have placed her in the position to run for the office she now seeks. She has denigrated these lawyers both publicly and privately. She has refused to support their efforts to obtain a fair wage adjustment. She has taken credit for the hard work of her employees. She has severely damaged the morale of the office,” Appleby wrote.
But in the end, AFSCME Council 5 endorsed Klobuchar’s Senate campaign.
Klobuchar the senator
In 2005, Klobuchar began making moves to run for Minnesota attorney general. Then Mondale called and asked her to withhold from announcing her campaign for a few months. Weeks later, then-Sen. Mark Dayton announced he would not seek reelection to a second term. She decided to run for his seat during the Democratic wave of 2006.
Cynthia Bauerly, a Minnesotan who worked for Sen. Chuck Schumer, began tutoring Klobuchar early on in her first campaign while she was still county attorney. Bauerly would have multiple morning meetings per week with Klobuchar to talk about national policy issues, sometimes while Abigail was running around getting ready for school. Bauerly came away impressed with Klobuchar’s work ethic and interest in details.
Throughout her 20 years in the U.S. Senate, Klobuchar has mastered popular issues, often shrewdly working with Republican co-sponsors. She’s helped make America’s pool drains safer for children; expanded access to broadband for rural Americans; spearheaded an elections bill to ensure a smooth presidential transition following the Jan. 6 insurrection; and shoveled money into agriculture on big farm bills.
As a new senator, she worked quickly after the deadly I-35W bridge collapse in 2007 to secure federal funding for a replacement.
Even when Klobuchar has taken on powerful opponents, like the pharmaceutical industry or Big Tech, the foes tend to be deeply unpopular. Her antitrust book hit just as the issue had become a popular bipartisan cause, and she managed to avoid any discussion of local behemoth UnitedHealth, whose employees have been major financial contributors to her campaigns for two decades.
UnitedHealth was only referenced in passing twice, while Klobuchar mentioned Amazon and Google hundreds of times.
Klobuchar explained her legislative philosophy in a Reformer interview: “My approach to getting things done for people has been about just not leaving people behind.”
While Walz has earned a reputation for glossing over the details of governance, Minnesota can expect something very different if Klobuchar is elected: She is known as a policy wonk who puts in long hours.
“I have never gotten much sleep and am just one of those people who enjoys being awake,” Klobuchar wrote in her 2023 memoir “The Joy of Politics.”
She uses all that time to pore over details and inspect the work of her staff, following up with late-night and early morning emails.
This got her into trouble when she ran for president in 2020.
Klobuchar demeaned and berated her staff almost daily, Buzzfeed reported in 2019, sometimes throwing papers and office supplies in her staff’s direction. Some Klobuchar staffers said they cried “all the time” under her employ, and others described a work environment marked by “volatility, highhandedness and distrust.”
The senator has often responded by noting elite alums who have worked in her office: Jake Sullivan served as President Joe Biden’s national security adviser after working in the Obama administration; his brother, Tom Sullivan, served as counselor of the U.S. Department of State. Andrea Mokros worked in the White House and later helped put on the Super Bowl in Minneapolis. Sara Grewing is a district court judge. Franny Starkey served as Michelle Obama’s scheduler. Peter Cahill, who oversaw Derek Chauvin’s trial and is a retired Hennepin County judge, was Klobuchar’s deputy in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. Bauerly was appointed by Gov. Mark Dayton as Department of Revenue commissioner.
“I’m pretty good at spotting talent, and I have high expectations for the people who work for me,” Klobuchar wrote in her 2015 memoir. “I figure that if they work really hard and do a good job on one of my campaigns or in my office, that experience will serve them well later on. I’m proud of how often it’s worked that way: over the years we’ve helped a lot of people to launch their own successful careers.”
Klobuchar will need to make this rather charitable interpretation of her management style become reality if she’s elected governor. As senator, she’s managed a few dozen people. As county attorney, she managed hundreds. As governor, she would be responsible for an enterprise of thousands of people.
The micromanager Minnesota needs?
Klobuchar is well-aware of her reputation. During the 2020 campaign, she tried to spin it in her favor, once arguing it was a sign of how tough she could be with an American adversary like Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
She’s making a similar argument in her run for governor.
Klobuchar told the Reformer that Minnesota needs a hands-on approach right now, especially in light of the hundreds of millions of dollars lost to fraud in the state’s social safety net programs.
“Right now in state government we need to make it more effective and accountable and that actually does include getting the details right and having higher expectations,” Klobuchar said.
Klobuchar has released a number of plans throughout her 10-month campaign, and she said she wants Minnesotans to hold her accountable for them.
“I really am going to create some high expectations,” Klobuchar said in the interview.
She said the Walz administration should have known taxpayer dollars were being lost to fraud, and hinted that she as governor will be keeping a watchful eye over Minnesota’s accounting books.
“People just should have noticed when you had a line item in the budget go from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions and millions and millions of dollars — that should have been a red flag,” Klobuchar said.
Demuth has argued a governor Klobuchar would be no different than Walz. Demuth has said Klobuchar should have leveled these criticisms of Walz much sooner, like while it was happening. Klobuchar has responded that once the Feeding Our Future scandal became public in early 2022, she secured extra prosecutorial resources for then-U.S. Attorney Andy Luger, who is yet another close ally.
For some younger Minnesotans, Klobuchar’s name has long been in the state zeitgeist and is nearly synonymous with Minnesota itself. Asked what people might be surprised to learn about her that they don’t already know, Klobuchar gave a Klobuchar-ian answer of humble-bragging, box-checking and a sports reference:
“My husband and I are halfway done with hiking the Superior Hiking Trail,” she said, adding that they have done it in stints and noting that the trail is over 300 miles long. “Sometimes it involves him having to trek back to get the car and go pick me up at the end … But if anything, it shows I’m very goal-oriented, and I will get this done when I’m governor, as well as my lieutenant governor’s prediction that the Vikings will win the Super Bowl when I’m governor.”
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
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