Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on Monday responded to recent reports from BuzzFeed News and HuffPost, outlining her poor treatment of staff, by admitting she’s “tough” on aides because she has “high expectations.”
“First of all, I love my staff. I wouldn’t be where I am and we wouldn’t be able to pass all of those bills and do all that work if we didn’t have great staff,” she said during an interview on “Good Morning America” Monday. “I am tough. I push people. That is true, but my point is that I have high expectations for myself. I have high expectations for the people that work for me and I have high expectation for this country.”
Klobuchar responds to reports on past poor treatment of staff pic.twitter.com/wxErDwyjyI
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) February 11, 2019
In the HuffPost piece about the environment in Klobuchar’s Washington, D.C. office, former staffers outlined the senator’s penchant for berating staff for small mistakes by copying other aides on emails. BuzzFeed reported that Klobuchar — who just announced her presidential bid on Sunday — once threw a binder across the room and it struck a former staffer.
I can’t express this sentiment more eloquently than Nate Silver did, so I’ll just quote him.
I’m trying to think of how this story would be framed if it were a discussion of Senator Arnold Klobuchar’s legendarily tough office environment.
The Nate Silver thought struck me as particularly unaware… of course this happens, and of course it has already been studied intensively?
Who among us hasn’t hurled a binder across the room in disgust? Or, at least because it bit us? No, seriously. God knows, I’ve done it.
I am now persuaded that her management style is somewhere between that of Gordon Ramsey and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. I get that this has been cocktail party gossip in DC for years and is a matter of great concern to the fraternity of congressional staffers who work long hours for not very good pay, in a situation where both housing and dressing costs are high, when they could just go to work on K-Street.
I just have yet to see anyone tell my why I should consider this relevant to her qualifications for the presidency.
Well, it might limit the quality of staff she’s able to attract. And the way you treat people underneath you says something about your character, I think. It’s not nothing.
But people aren’t perfect, and it’s miles away from disqualifying on its own. IMHO.
It would be something like although he’s always quick with a joke or a wisecrack he’s “known to have a temper.” But the unspoken context would be that of course these A personalities have tempers. They said that regularly about Bill Clinton. Just part of being a guy in a high-pressure job.