Is This Presidential Candidate the World's Worst Boss or the Hard Worker America Needs? Discuss.
What was it really like to work for Sen. Amy Klobuchar — was it a nightmare or wasn’t it, and what would it be like if she were running the country?
That’s the debate at the heart of headlines and news stories about the 58-year-old Democratic politician, who recently announced she is running for president.
Klobuchar is the senior senator from Minnesota and is widely popular there, having been elected three times by overwhelming margins, despite President Donald Trump almost eking out a surprise victory in the state in 2016.
Earlier this month, Klobuchar announced she would be challenging Trump for the presidency — “hopeful,” as the New York Times put it, “that her moderate politics, Midwestern roots and carefully cultivated history of bipartisanship can appeal to a broad swath of voters in contentious times.” (For her part, Klobuchar has chafed at the “moderate” label, saying on MSNBC, “I think they should see me as a progressive because I believe in progress.”)
Despite her decade-plus in the Senate, Klobuchar has a lower national profile than fellow Democrats such as Sens. Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Recent polling shows her trailing them as well as former Vice President Joe Biden and even Beto O’Rourke, a Texas lawmaker who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Ted Cruz last year.
Still, goes the conventional wisdom, Klobuchar’s skill as a retail politician — deft while face-to-face with voters and attentive to constituent needs — and her Minnesota roots could be invaluable.
“You’re looking at a future president,” one supporter reportedly told a friend at a Klobuchar rally in November. Her status got another boost thanks to her composed questioning during the bruising confirmation hearing for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
RELATED: Trump Mocks ‘Snowman(woman)’ Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 Run Speech — and She Claps Back with Hair Dig
The Midwest is already shaping up to be a key front in the 2020 election: It was Hillary Clinton‘s defeat there, by a thin margin, that handed Trump the presidency in 2016.
But before all of that, Klobuchar’s nascent campaign has had to contend with ever more startling reports from former staffers, both men and women, who claim she is a horrible boss: not just demanding and exacting, capricious and cruel, even verbally abusive and physically volatile — but all of those things, at once.
“The way she treats staff is disqualifying,” a former aide, who is a woman, told Yahoo News in an article published the day after Klobuchar’s campaign announcement.
“If you can’t treat the people closest to you with respect, I don’t trust you to treat the American people with respect,” a former staffer told the site.
Other current and former staffers say the opposite. Some have argued sexism, explicit or more subtle, is at work in negative reactions to Klobuchar as a boss. (There have been many previous reports about other members of Congress accused of being toxic or abusive bosses, though the Klobuchar stories — given her presidential bid — have attracted more notice.)
In a statement shared with PEOPLE, campaign spokeswoman Carlie Waibel said, “The senator has repeatedly acknowledged that she can be tough and push people hard. But these anonymous stories — some of which are just plain ridiculous — do not overshadow the countless experiences of people on the senator’s team who she has been so proud to work with.”
In a previous statement, the campaign said:
“Senator Klobuchar loves her staff — they are the reason she has gotten to where she is today. She has many staff who have been with her for years — including her Chief of Staff and her State Director, who have worked for her for 5 and 7 years respectively, as well as her political advisor Justin Buoen, who has worked for her for 14 years — and many who have gone on to do amazing things, from working in the Obama Administration (over 20 of them) to running for office to even serving as the Agriculture Commissioner for Minnesota. She is proud of them and the work they have done for Minnesota.”
Yahoo’s report came days after a series of articles in the Huffington Post in which an ex-Klobuchar aide said, “She was constantly lighting new fires. … When you have people who don’t want to work for you, you can’t be as effective.”
Following Yahoo and the Huffington Post pieces was a BuzzFeed story in which a staffer was quoted saying, “I cried. I cried, like, all the time.”
On Friday, citing “interviews with more than two dozen former staff members” as well as workplace emails, the Times published its own look at Klobuchar’s managerial style.
None of the former staffers who criticized the senator did so by name, instead choosing to speak anonymously out of what they said was fear of retribution.
Klobuchar’s defenders have been happy to be identified in full.
“I came to Capitol Hill to work hard and to get stuff done, and there is nobody that works harder or gets more done than Amy Klobuchar,” ex-aide Asal Sayas told Yahoo. “These are tough jobs and you need to be able to rise to the occasion. I learned a lot, we got a lot done and had fun along the way.”
The ex-staffers who are critical of Klobuchar, as detailed by four different news organizations so far, paint a portrait of the senator as detrimentally obsessed with her image among the press and other politicians; focused on her high standards to the point of berating and humiliating employees publicly; and prone to displays of displeasure that sound, in writing them out, almost outlandish.
One story goes that Klobuchar made a staffer clean the comb she had used to eat her lunchtime salad because he forgot to bring her a fork.
RELATED: Sen. Amy Klobuchar Loved Rachel Dratch’s SNL Impression — You ‘Got My Daughter to Text Me’
The Times reported that Klobuchar’s office laid out a paid parental leave policy that “effectively required [staffers], once they returned, to remain with the office for three times as many weeks as they had been gone.” Klobuchar’s office told the paper the policy had been revised and was never enforced in that way.
Multiple ex-staffers spoke of her all-hours emails, often in all-caps, spotlighting what they said were inconsequential errors. Aides also talked of being made to perform personal duties akin to a housekeeper, including washing dishes and doing laundry.
In another story that came up multiple times, Klobuchar sometimes threw things in frustration, though the accounts differ on whether she would target staffers. One person told the Huffington Post they saw an aide accidentally struck by a binder thrown by Klobuchar.
As these critical ex-staffers describe it, Klobuchar was often obsessed with holding her staff to a standard that, in her view, none of them seemed able to reach — a fixation that drove her to hang up on minor errors. She had no issue being visibly, volcanically unhappy.
“It’s always ‘the worst,’ ” one former staffer told the Huffington Post, “It was ‘the worst’ one two weeks ago.”
In an email reviewed by the Times, she wrote to her staff about her Twitter account: “We are becoming a joke and it is making me a joke.”
In another email, she wrote, “Please don’t claim lack of time. I flew in at one in the morning. I don’t have that luxury to blame lack of time. Unless YOU were up working at one am, and up again five am the next day, please don’t claim lack of time. That was when I was up.”
On MSNBC recently, Klobuchar said, “I know I can be too tough sometimes and I can push too hard, that’s obvious. But a lot of it is because I have high expectations for myself. I have high expectations for the people that work with me. And mostly I’m going to take those high expectations and bring them out to the country.”
Ex-staffers undercut this stump-speech view.
“I’m not an anxious person; I’ve worked for other tough bosses,” a former employee told BuzzFeed. “But it’s hard to explain the anxiety that permeates the office. It’s an overwhelming sense of panic and not being able to plan. You never knew what was going to come at you. That compounds, and it affects the workplace.”
Many of the former employees who spoke out, rather than be quoted recounting specific anecdotes, put their experience in abstractly grave terms, according to these news reports: “plainly abusive,” “intolerably cruel,” “dehumanizing.”
A staffer told BuzzFeed: “I’ve always been taught that your true character shows in how you treat those with less power than you, especially behind closed doors. The way Sen. Klobuchar behaves in private with her staff is very different than when she’s in the public eye, and that kind of cruelty shouldn’t be acceptable for anyone.”
But the senator’s supporters have been just as full-throated in their defense.
“[She] cared deeply for me as her staffer,” former aide Kali Cruz told BuzzFeed. “When I was pregnant with my first baby, she threw me a baby shower, opening up her home and cooking a meal for my family and friends. We worked hard, but we always had some fun, too.”
RELATED: Meet the 2020 Presidential Candidates — So Far!
One former staffer, speaking anonymously, told BuzzFeed: “Her office is a very successful office, and in part the reason she’s reelected with the margin she has, and enjoys the popularity in-state, is a result of her hardworking office and a member who’s very focused on representing her state.”
Said another: “Her job wasn’t to be my mentor and cheerleader. Her job was to get s— done for Minnesota.”
Ex-aide Erikka Knuti recalled for the Times that Klobuchar had apologized her for being snappish around other people. “That wasn’t okay,” she said, according to Knuti.
In an open letter posted on Medium on Sunday, some 60 former staffers signed a statement attesting to what they said was Klobuchar’s support and mentorship, “push[ing] us to be better professionals and public servants.”
“We remain grateful for our time in Senator Klobuchar’s office and still consider Amy a mentor and friend. Sadly, this was not fully conveyed in the recent news reports,” they wrote.
The letter was posted by Erick Garcia Luna, who worked for Klobuchar from 2009 to 2014, according to the Huffington Post. He told the site he was confused by other former staffers who had not enjoyed their time with the senator.
“I don’t know what to make of them, to be frank,” he said.
