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.
Agree, but this is one other appalling part of the story. The headline is not “Klobuchar Staffers Tell More Tales of Abuse,” or even “Klobuchar Staffers Split on Abuse.” The headline — the thing that so many browsers and “rip and read” broadcast news reporters never get past these days — is the best case scenario for Klobuchar:
“KLOBUCHAR SAYS SHE’LL DO BETTER IN TREATMENT OF STAFFERS. The Minnesota senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate responds to reports that she is hard on employees.”
Minnesota Nice, that Amy. Redemption. Putting the story to bed for good. She’s “hard on employees,” not throwing shit like a child or unstable narcissist. The PR people were giving each other high fives when they saw that headline.
I’d love to hear what the grizzled political writers think of all this. It’s these sorts of things — on big stories — that make my eyes roll at every journalism seminar where, editors usually, gas on about “following the story wherever it goes.”
So, what I’d like to see…..
Amy isn’t going to become President. She’s too boring. I suppose she has a chance at the VP slot, but even that is a long shot.
What do you suppose are the chances of a follow up on this topic 3 years down the road?
Reverse victimization claims that these stories are symtpoms of sexism directed at ambitious Amy because she is, you know, woman gendered, in contemporary Newspeak. I’ve never been a fan of Klobuchar, but reading her autobiography “The Senator Next Door,” raised my estimation of her a whole lot. Then her sudden prominence from the Kavanaugh hearings gave her the national recognition she’d not previously enjoyed. In political calculus, she was looking to me like the kind of dark horse who could run as the very antithesis of Trump. If the “middle of the road, hold hands across the aisles” pose was just a careful role-playing, if she didn’t actually believe her own bullshit, then the ingredients might be there for a formidable campaign. How could Trump lay a glove on her? A moral and political antidote to Sarah Palin, right from the heartland, and smart enough to not get sucker-punched. She could turn out to be Cassius Clay in the ring against Sonny Liston. (Although I wouldn’t anticipate that she’d follow the knockout with a declaration of conversion to, let us say, some leftist radical ideology.)
I’d overlook a lot of past provocations in her record, if a Liston-Clay scenario developed. In my enthusiasm, I pitched the idea to someone I know who is connected to top-level DFL power politics. My friend, who is politically an establishment liberal, agreed that the Senator was really smart and was well-placed politically to run right down the middle, perhaps successfully.
But not with my friend’s support. And she proceeded to tell me the “inside dope.” I’m an outsider, so it was news to me. The word was, Klobuchar was impossible to work for–demanding and dictatorial and mean. The person explaining the facts of life to me was not only a well-informed source, she had no motive to mislead (and has always been candid and truthful) and as a feminist DFL stalwart, couldn’t be accused of sexism, couldn’t be SUSPECTED of sexism, and I am sure spoke far more in sorrow than out of any ulterior or discreditable motive.
There you have it. Of course, if Klobuchar is the nominee, I’d say vote for her. Heck, if Diane Feinstein were the nominee, I’d say vote for her.
FWIW, I have heard the same from one of my son’s best friends (female), who worked in Keith Ellison’s congressional office. She was friends with people who did work in Klobuchar’s office and that she’d never work for Klobuchar, who was widely known as a terrible boss.