I started watching interviews of Senator Amy Klobuchar back around February of this year, and I really, really liked her. She was in my top two favorites right up until the time that reports started coming out that she had been mean to her staff. At the time, I was really disappointed. I thought to myself, “Darn, I really like Amy Klobuchar, but I do not want a President who treats his or her staff badly!”.
Because of this, In my mind Senator Klobuchar went to the back burner. I figured that there were lots of good candidates, so we do not have to pick someone mean. Yet, since then, I have repeatedly seen television interviews of her, and she keeps coming off as someone extremely smart, capable, full of common sense, and—get this—she seems to have the best disposition of any of the candidates. Also, she had this disposition before the reports came out that she was a big meanie.
The way Amy Klobuchar acts in public has never seemed to square very well with the idea of her being a big meanie with her staff all the time in private. Now, Donald Trump I can totally believe yelling at his staff in private on a regular basis because he is such a jerk in public. So, how do I square things with how Senator Klobuchar is in public and what some of her staff have apparently said about her in private? Here’s my best guess:
1. Yes, Amy Klobuchar probably has occasionally yelled at or been short or curt with her staff.
2. When she did so, they probably deserved it.
Now, overall, I am not a fan of yelling at people. I believe that it should, in general, be avoided whenever possible. That said, since I have been a supervisor many times in my life, I understand the idea of getting incredibly frustrated with an underling, especially when he or she messes up over and over again. Usually, when I have gotten angry with an employee it has been because he or she did something really stupid that caused me a huge amount of grief or because she or she has been messing up over and over again for weeks or months.
I was born in 1963, and in my lifetime I have been yelled at lots of times by my parents, my siblings, my schoolmates, my friends, my enemies, my teachers, my not so close relatives, and even by total strangers. I have never liked it, and sometimes I hated it, but I always quickly forgave someone for doing if if I had genuinely caused them a lot of grief. When I became an adult and started working on a regular basis, I always believed that part of what I was getting paid for was dealing with my boss, and some of them had terrible dispositions. I believe it may have been the character Red Forman on the television series That 70s Show who, when advising his son Eric about his first job, said something to the effect of, “Work is about putting up with tons of your bosses crap”.
One might also want to note that dozens of Amy Klobuchar’s staff have ended up going on to bigger and better things. Apparently, President Obama regularly poached from her staff. Klobuchar herself says she expects a lot from her staff. Apparently, when Amy Klobuchar is finished training her staff members, they are usually in high demand. Perhaps she is part Drill Sargent—whipping her staff into shape—and sometimes giving a staff member grief when her or she is slacking.
The thing is, at this point, I am no longer worried if she yelled at her staff on occasion. I am sure that her staff were warned how tough it would be the day that they were hired, and politics has never been a place for cream puffs. My opinion is that Klobuchar is too darn smart, personable, and hard working to be ruled out. Also, I think she is twice as tough at Donald Trump and would crush him in a debate because she does her homework, seems to have oodles of common sense, and is happy to give a press conference in the snow when Donald Trump will not even go out in the rain to honor our nation’s fallen soldiers.
Finally, there seems to be a double standard. I know that Lyndon Johnson gave a hard time to quite a few people before he became President. He was famous for “twisting arms” in the Senate. Do you think that General Eisenhower may have yelled at a few people before he became President? In the 1990s, there was talk of General Colin Powell running for President. Would anyone have cared how many people he yelled at? If Senator Amy Klobuchar were a man, would this have even been an issue?
So, perhaps, at times, Senator Amy Klobuchar has been tough and mean? So freaking what. All the better to kick Trump’s ass, my dear. :)