How Flawed Is Too Flawed To Be An Effective Candidate?

I'm sure no one doubts that Trump and his allies have every intention in the world of causing as much chaos as they can-- and worse-- in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Writing for CNN yesterday, Jeff Zeleny and Kaitlan Collins reported that Trump is watching announcement rallies, tuning into televised town hall sessions with voters and listening carefully to commentary on the Democratic presidential race. His opinions fluctuate on who he will, or would like to, run against. But one sentiment is unwavering-- he has no plans to sit idly by and watch. [He] intends to play an active role in the Democratic primary and has instructed his aides to look for ways he can, according to more than a dozen Republicans involved in his campaign. His team is working to sow divisions among rivals and looking for opportunities to 'cause chaos from the left and right,' in the words of one adviser."

And despite the concerted effort by corporate media-- led, wittingly or not, by Rachel Maddow-- to white-wash Amy Klobuchar's transgressions, no one is giving Trump an easier target that the aggressively boring senior senator from Minnesota, whose claim to "Minnesota Nice is, at best, tenuous. No doubt Trump lapped up the noise, How Amy Klobuchar Treats Her Staff, by in the NY Times, yesterday. After interviewing dozens of Klobuchar staffers, Matt Flegenheimer and Sydney Ember wrote that "In private, she could deliver slashing remarks without particular provocation. Parched one day in the Capitol, she turned to a member of her team and said, 'I would trade three of you for a bottle of water,' according to a person who witnessed it." That's an example of what earlier in the month Maddow excused as her winning sense of humor. Had Bernie (or Trump) said it, Maddow would be accusing them of colluding with Russian aluminum barons.

Former aides said Klobuchar frequently told them they were damaging her political career. On one occasion, a former aide recalled, Klobuchar accused her of "ruining my marriage," too. (The aide said she interpreted the comment to mean that Klobuchar, in her telling, was forced to work overtime, away from family, to overcome the aide's failings.)

Many staff members did warmly recall the misery-loves-company camaraderie that built among aggrieved aides. But the core truth of life with Klobuchar was never going to change, they said: She thought she was demanding their best and getting far less. And she was never going to apologize for pointing that out.

"I need to do some serious soul searching about our office," she said in one e-mail, lamenting the team's work product. "How can you treat me like this time and time again?"

One of the top and most respected Capitol Hill staffers sent me this last night-- word for word: "Off the record-- I have a former colleague who worked for her and said the coverage isn’t fair... he says she’s far worse than what has been reported."

Moments later, a member of Congress, unsolicited, sent me a note asserting that "a staggering number of staffers on Capitol Hill are self-important shitheads who waste all their time gossiping and never do anything useful. It is FAR more difficult to get anything useful out of the staffers than it is other Members, even Republicans. And the way I have been playing it, there is a lot more at stake than who cleans the salad out of the comb." He did, however, go on to say that what was really sad about the article is that "Klobuchar’s main legislative 'accomplishment' is swimming pool safety. If someone could find me a candidate who had instituted universal healthcare, I wouldn’t care if he or she held some staffer upside down out the window by his ankles, and shook him until the change fell out of his pockets.

"The other day, I looked into how someone as deeply incompetent and stupid as Theresa May could ever have been elected the head of the Conservative Party. The answer is this:

• One opponent pointed out that she had children and May did not, which was reported endlessly in the media as a vicious low blow.
• Another opponent sexted a woman who was not his wife.
• Another opponent came out in favor of a third runway at Heathrow Airport, which somehow was twisted by the media into a callous disregard for the right to peace and quiet.

"The only thing that even remotely resembled debate of a serious issue is that May was the only candidate who said that she 'would negotiate' to kick three million legal EU emigrants out on their asses when Britain left the EU, while the others said they could stay.

"I’m sorry about the salad and the comb, but this already is descending into trivial bullshit. And Trump will exploit it-- mark my words."

No one's going to ever have a White House as chaotic, miserable, paranoid and dysfunctional as Trump. But that's way too low a bar to set for aspiring politicians eyeing the White House. Her staffers say she crosses the line between being a demanding boss and being a dehumanizing boss. She told her staff that their tweeting (in her name) makes her look like a joke and that she feared there was "an in-house mole." She rate-fucked staffers who left her employee when prospective employers asked for recommendations. She sounds like exactly I would have avoided hiring as a department head when I was president of Reprise Records. She was "the steward of a work environment colored by volatility, highhandedness and distrust." Staff turnover in her office "perennially ranks near the highest in the Senate." People like Klobuchar fail leadership tests and produce crap results-- always... no, not sometimes-- always; I don't care how much Rachel Maddow appreciates the deference the senator pays her.



"She was known to throw office objects in frustration," wrote Flegenheimer and Ember, "including binders and phones, in the direction of aides, they said. Low-level employees were asked to perform duties they described as demeaning, like washing her dishes or other cleaning-- a possible violation of Senate ethics rules. One of those tasks was so disgusting that I'm not going to write it out at DWT.

While there was wide consensus in the interviews that women were often held to a different standard as bosses, former aides — female and male — said their concerns about Klobuchar's behavior should not be dismissed as gender bias. Many of the aides said they had worked for both men and women, for lawmakers both compassionate and unkind, without encountering anyone else like Klobuchar.

The world of congressional staffs is one of long hours and low pay, with much of the work shouldered by twentysomething junior aides who are learning on the job. Some members of Congress are notorious for round-the-clock phone calls, late-night e-mail and fierce attention to their own press coverage. Klobuchar is among them, but former aides said they were especially troubled by her willingness-- in excess of other senators', they said-- to embarrass staff members over minor missteps or with odd requests.

Most of those interviewed for this article-- describing memories that span from shortly after her election in 2006 to the much more recent past-- discussed their time with Klobuchar on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the senator. These concerns were not idle, they said. Saving potentially damaging e-mails from Klobuchar became something of a last-day ritual, the aides said, in case they ever needed evidence of her conduct for their own reputational protection.

She was known to throw office objects in frustration, including binders and phones, in the direction of aides, they said. Low-level employees were asked to perform duties they described as demeaning, like washing her dishes or other cleaning-- a possible violation of Senate ethics rules, according to veterans of the chamber.

Appraisals of perceived staff incompetence were delivered at all hours of the day and night:

"In 20 years in politics I have never seen worse prep," Klobuchar said in one e-mail, displeased at how a political event had been handled.

"This is the hands down worse thing you have ever given me," she wrote in another, questioning her team's grasp of policy as she rejected its "slop."

"This is the worst press staff I ever had," she announced once to employees, according to an aide present. This was effectively a rite of passage, the aide said: The senator had plainly said the same about both predecessors and successors in the office.

This much is not in dispute: For years, Klobuchar has had among the highest rates of staff turnover in the Senate, according to a review of congressional offices from the website LegiStorm. Over much of her Senate career, no one outpaced Klobuchar on this score; in 2017, two freshman senators, John Kennedy of Louisiana and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, surpassed her.

The churn has produced a bit of a vicious circle. Democrats in Washington say she has struggled to recruit and retain top talent. Some operatives say they have shied away from her 2020 campaign, mindful of Klobuchar's reputation.

Among other concerns, her office's paid parental leave policy has been described as unusual on Capitol Hill. Two people familiar with the policy said that those who took paid leave were effectively required, once they returned, to remain with the office for three times as many weeks as they had been gone. The policy, outlined in an employee handbook, called for those who left anyway to pay back money earned during the weeks they were on leave.

After receiving questions about the policy from the Times, Klobuchar's office said it would be revised. "We offer 12 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave for our staff and have one of the strongest paid leave policies in the Senate," said a spokeswoman, Elana Ross. "We've never made staff pay back any of their leave and will be changing that language in the handbook." She declined to provide a copy of the current policy as written.

This kind of stuff should point journalists to ask tough questions about how her behavior could portend for the office she's seeking-- although, Maddow might say, that it's so much easier to just let it slide and guarantee herself another first-in-the-nation interview if she ever needs one again on a slow news night. Axios managing editor David Nather pointed out why this matters: "As a new candidate without a well-defined national profile, Klobuchar's treatment of her staff has become a damaging storyline that could overwhelm what she has to say about issues." Klobuchar and her cronies would like to say criticism of her behavior is sexist-- but Amanda Terkel, writing late yesterday for HuffPo recognized that identity politics bullshit argument for what it is: offensive to feminists. One former Klobuchar staffer: "It’s not that there’s not merit to the argument that other men have been abusive and gotten away with it. It doesn’t make it OK for anybody. We don’t say, we haven’t held men accountable in the past for this on Capitol Hill, so why start now?"

Advocates for women in politics have long been focused on dismantling the barriers that kept men in power and shut women out. And while the 2020 Democratic primary is the first time in history when a significant portion of the candidates running are women, many of those barriers still exist. Women still face more questions about their fitness for office in ways that men don’t.

But with women in power, there are going to be good bosses. And there are going to be bad ones. And criticizing a female politician doesn’t mean that it’s a sexist attack. Feminism is, of course, ultimately about more than getting women into elected office.

“The only way to excuse the Klobuchar allegations is to conflate cruelty with feminism,” wrote Jezebel writer Ashley Reese. “It’s the reductive Bad Ass #GirlBoss model of empowerment that celebrates virtually anything women do-- because a woman did it. It’s about getting ahead, not other women.”

Klobuchar faced allegations of mistreating her staff as far back as 2006, when she was the Hennepin County attorney in Minneapolis-- undercutting the Wall Street Journal’s view that the upset aides are just a bunch of snowflake millennials.

  “I’m hearing people saying, ‘They just didn’t know how to work in a high-pressure environment,’ or ‘they couldn’t take the high stakes or the tough boss or the tough feedback.’ It’s incredibly insulting. It’s gaslighting,” said one of the former Klobuchar staffers. “It’s the kind of thing people tell people who have been abused. It’s not abuse, you just didn’t live up to the standards, and that’s your fault.”

Obviously, Klobuchar's shortcomings and foibles aren't the only targets Trump is tucking away in a fold of his malevolent reptilian brain. Right now it doesn't look like New Jersey junior senator Cory Booker is going to break through into the top ranks of major candidates. But if he does, Eliana Johnson's 2014 piece in the National Review will serve as a guide post to paint him as just another corrupt New Jersey pol. A former Booker staffer confirmed the general accuracy of the report, in as much as Booker ran a culture-of-corruption administration in Newark, and the crippling damage it would do to candidate Booker if he ever had to face Trump. "You know as well as I do," he told me, "it's impossible to come up in New Jersey politics without being tainted by corruption. Democratic politics in New Jersey, just like Republican politics in New Jersey is a swamp where anything goes-- and everything does. Has there every been an above-board politician from New Jersey? If you find one, let me know." At the time of the National Review piece, there was bipartisan support for demanding that the New Jersey Legislative Select Committee on Investigation look into "abuses of power and cover-ups" in the seven years that Cory Booker was mayor of Newark. Booker-- like his pal Chris Christie-- has always painted himself as someone working to root out corruption. And isn't that what corrupted politicians always do? Johnson wrote that "the comptroller’s report on the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation (NWCDC) paints a different picture-- of, at best, Booker’s inattentive oversight in allowing the agency, which until recently was responsible for providing all of the city’s water, to fleece millions from the public fisc while his political allies enriched themselves. At worst, it suggests Booker knowingly let his friends profit on the city’s dime." It would be a shame if the Democrats deprive themselves of the corruption weapon in a battle with the most corrupt "president" in American history by nominating a candidate with questionable credibility in the area.

I want to bring up something I referred to last night, Brian Hanley's Medium post about why Democrats ought to nominate Bernie. He enumerated 20 reasons but I'm just going to reproduce one-- the third in his list:

He’s the most popular politician in the country.

While Trump broke the record for the worst favorability ratings of any nominee in history, Sanders maintains the highest favorability scores of any elected official. Sanders continues to be the most popular politician in the country by a large margin. He’s the only one on either side who the majority of voters like. Even a Fox News survey found that no other politician was more well liked and most Republicans say that he’s honest.

This chart was from 2016 but it's still instructive today, especially when you look at some of the other Democrats vying for the nomination, particularly Biden, Gillibrand, Booker and Klobuchar-- the centrists, all liars who the best you can say about is that they don't lie as much as Trump. Oh boy!