It was a very warm and sunny Saturday when Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar came down from the north country for a visit. Neither of the Boys wanted to spend time in the dark, low-ceilinged room where she did her “meet-and-greet”, though one of them did ultimately make a cameo appearance. The room—the backroom stage at a local bar that has been a significant venue in Iowa City (folk/singer-songwriter) music for over fifty years—was near its capacity of 246. The crowd included the requisite local pols, quite a few people who seemed like they might have been in the room before for its more usual purposes, plus some apparent outliers. One of those, a young woman with rings in her nose and platform-type shoes that had heels that flashed when she walked, turned out to be one of the Senator’s staffers. The Senator herself, in khaki slacks, comfortable flats, sensible glasses, and utilitarian combo shirt/coat (and, no, her hair doesn’t “hang long”, for anyone wondering), was dressed as though for a day of campaigning, which, in fact, she was doing.
The location made rather more sense than it might have seemed to at first. The pictures on the walls were of lowa City musicians who played the room, some of whom had also played a Minnesota venue that this audience surely also knew: “A Prairie Home Companion”, the public radio program that justified the ways of Upper Midwest gods to man(y) through the words of fallen Minnesota angel Garrison Keillor. These are the people—both the Senator and this Iowa City crowd—who know about “hot dishes” but don’t themselves eat them (anymore). They—both the Senator and this Iowa City crowd—have moved on from their provinciality without having moved out from the provinces (except, of course, she has). They—this Iowa City crowd—realized that she wasn’t just The Senator; she was, in fact, “Our Amy”. And Our Amy evidently realizes this fact too, and that a local fact doesn’t obviously or easily become a national act.
So Our Amy tells us about visiting Jimmy Carter in Atlanta. Jimmy Carter? Well, there are only three Democratic former Presidents. Obama has to hover above the internal party sausage-making, so he’s not an option. Bill Clinton . . . ? The question answers itself. But Jimmy Carter was, after all, the ultimate Onion headline: Area man goes to Nation’s Capital, and the not-really-so-plain Man from Plains told her about “how he ran this grass-roots effort” that got him nominated and elected POTUS (only that?). Our Amy wants us to know she’s doing her homework.
Our Amy does, however, have a Clinton problem—Hillary Clinton. Why should Our Amy succeed against Don Trump when HC did not—Our Amy is not going to out-resume HC—and how to explain why HC failed without creating . . . problems? First comes the sugar: “Hillary Clinton ran a strong race. . . . She was so strong in those debates. She had good policy ideas. She would have been a great President.” Yet if you’re so smart, how come your not POTUS (only rich)? Here’s where Our Amy is very shrewd: “But no one had ever run against the likes of Donald Trump before, right? And now we have all learned, everyone has learned a lot.” So it wasn’t HC’s fault (well, perhaps a little bit: Our Amy won’t say this, but—Don Trump was unprecedented, but maybe that wouldn’t have unpresidented the right opponent). Our Amy has studied hard, and she’s come up with an answer, but can she pass the test?
Don Trump just “wants to distract us every single day . . . [so] he controls the news cycle . . . he doesn’t care if it’s bad policy . . . he doesn’t care about any of that.” Our Amy has three prongs for Don Trump. First, “Sometimes you have to be very strong, stand your ground, be out there, [like] when he takes on immigrants . . . .” Second, “But sometimes guys, you ignore him, all right? You don’t have to respond to every single thing he does” And finally the kicker: “And sometimes I think a very good approach, which I hope you noticed I’m very good at, ‘cause I’ve used it in many races before, is that you use humor.” Now we know how to distinguish the merely strong candidate from the right one.
Once attention gets paid, it’s clear Our Amy is funny, with not only some set punch lines and bits (“[Jimmy Carter] sends me emails now that end “JC” and it’s like Jesus Christ is sending me email—WOOOW!”; “I set what is still an all-time Senate record—listen up students—I raised 17K from ex-boyfriends. You want to keep those relations strong, right? But as my husband has pointed out, it is not an expanding base.”; “So when [Trump] went after me, when I made my announcement in that blizzard, for talking about climate change he called me ‘Snow Women’ Whew . . . that is kind of good actually . . . then I said the science is on my side Donald Trump, and I’d like to see how your hair would fare in a blizzard, Mr. Umbrella Man!”) but also an ability to respond in stride in the moment (“So yes it’s a story about infrastructure—thank you [pointing to crowd], one person clapping for infrastructure”; “ . . . and the unions struck in Chicago, and that is how we got our antitrust laws. We are literally entering another Gilded Age [baby cries] . . . yes I would cry too over consolidation . . .”). Our Amy has timing, can glide seamlessly into ad libs, and punctuates her punchlines with appropriate emphasis, laughter, and gestures.
But having been well-paid, attention should deliver still more. How is it that Our Amy comes by these polished skills and abilities—if not major league level, like Keillor or Al Franken, two (notoriously) funny Minnesotans, then the high minors—and her assurance that she has them anyway?
The cooked tour she gives of her personal bio-sphere is a biopic that seems equal parts myopic and mythopoeic: “My grandpa was an iron ore miner, he worked 1500 feet underground his whole life. . . . My dad was the first one to go to college; my grandpa saved money in a coffee can to send him to a two year community college. . . . [Then] he got his four-year journalism degree [at the University of Minnesota]. He goes from ramshackle mining town to interview everyone from Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka to Ginger Rogers. . . . My mom grew up in Milwaukee . . . she wanted to make her way in the world [and] she looked over the border to Minnesota because they had—union friends—stronger unions! [Hmmm. . . too bad I can’t vote for mom.] She taught 2nd grade until she was 70 years old”
Our Amy leaves a few things out: she didn’t go to a two-year college or the state university; Yale and University of Chicago law school for her. She didn’t return to Minnesota because of its unions; she worked as a corporate lawyer. And she apparently didn’t just wander into Minnesota politics: she interned with Veep Walter Mondale and her senior thesis (published as a book!) was on the politics of building the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome stadium in Minneapolis—looks like Our Amy moved back with her own personal public-private partnership in mind. But there’s a harder-to-pan nugget that suggests something different: in college she was a member of a comedy improv group.
So Our Amy knew she was funny from way back, and she wanted to do something about it. Improv comedy is famous for sharing—don’t seek the quick punch-line, receive what’s offered with “yes, and. . .” and then develop it. As in all improvisation, you have to be responsive and prepared, with practiced approaches to call on in unplanned situations; you have to make your mind both fully open to the moment and fully available to yourself. It’s also a way of making you and your mind not fully available to anyone but yourself: you can develop a capacity to be in the moment while also in character, skillfully showing a version of yourself that is responsive and funny (hence admirable), but, finally, not really revealing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (especially for those who have some extremely unblind ambition).
Attention notices, too, that (sotto voce?) concession to Trump: “. . . that is kind of good actually. . . ” Is Our Amy simply preparing a scouting report for the upcoming Main Event: when you get quiplashed by Don Trump, it may, sometimes, not be only, and entirely, mean? Is it one (semi-)pro giving (grudging) due to another? Or does attention lead somewhere else still? Infamously for Don Trump, it (whatever it is) is always about him.
Our Amy isn’t like that, but her humor doesn’t seem ever to be self-deprecating. There aren’t verbal versions of, say, Buster Keaton’s world of malevolent inanimate objects conspiring against one, or stories where the teller ends up the butt of the joke. Perhaps these are just not self-presentations someone who wants to be Senator and then POTUS would find tactically sound. Fair enough. But suppose that these are not ways of imagining oneself or experiencing the world that someone who wants to be Senator and then POTUS ever entertains. Not quite fair enough, and it might feel a little worrisome if it really does come with the territory. Our Amy apparently isn’t so much like us after all—which might be necessary, since with (the desire for) great power comes great ego. As Jimmy Carter himself, baring his teeth with his characteristic ambiguity, once put it in response to being asked whether he had felt overwhelmed in the POTUS office, “No one gets to that office who doesn’t feel equal to it.” Maybe one of the topics Our Amy didn’t report talking about with JC was how to appear just meek enough to warrant inheriting the earth.
Our Amy does have policies and programs, of course. They are aggressively moderate and Midwestern, with the two confusedly run together, and she checks various required boxes from that perspective, such as it is, as well as few others (e.g., importance of mental health initiatives). Mostly, she wants us to understand that she wins elections, that an election winner is who we want, and that therefore . . . .
One of the Boys wandered in after Our Amy had finished her remarks and was staging pictures and brief conversations with crowd members. He was disappointed that he had missed all of her talk. What, he wanted to know, did she sound like? I was stymied. North-Central vs. North Midland vs. Inland North accents—no, that wouldn’t do, even if I could do it. “Maybe like she’s from here,” I finally ventured, “but not quite.”