The Klobuchar kludge

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar specializes in avoiding outspoken stands on important issues. She looks for opportunities to lead the way on trivialities calculated to garner broad public support, such as her crusade against the threat to life and limb posed by “The crisis of the detergent pod.”

Senator Klobuchar is a reliable vote for the Democratic Party line, but she is quiet about it. She doesn’t want to upset anybody. She wants to preside over an era of good feelings — of good feelings about Amy Klobuchar.

It’s a form of inanity that has won Klobuchar followers among the mainstream media. She has even turned it into a forthcoming book, The Senator Next Door: A Memoir From the Heartland. The book promises to reveal “her own political philosophy grounded in her belief that partisan flame-throwing takes no courage at all; what really matters is forging alliances with unlikely partners to solve the nation’s problems.”

Klobuchar’s form of inanity is geared to the reportorial pussycats at the Star Tribune, newspaper of Twin Cities Democrats. The Star Tribune touts Klobuchar’s trivial legislative ventures and pratfalls as though she were the second coming of Hubert Humphrey.

A funny thing happened on the way to Klobuchar’s latest legislative accomplishment. She triggered a controversy over the universally supported human trafficking bill for which she had responsibility in committee. After voting for the bill, she says she failed to note the traditional prohibition for federal funding of abortion that was included in the bill’s language. When the Democrats’ paymasters called for resistance, Klobuchar dutifully followed. We wrote about the incident in “Dems traffick in cynicism.”

The Dems’ subsequent maneuvers provoked Majority Leader McConnell to exercise a prerogative of leadership, slowing the confirmation of the execrable Loretta Lynch as the new Eric Holder. How would Senator Klobuchar extricate herself from this traffick jam?

According to her faithful followers at the Star Tribune, Senator Klobuchar had an epiphany in a cornfield outside Moorhead, Minnesota. It’s quite a moving story. If there is an entrepreneur in sight, it may inspire a shrine to the perpetually gullible.

Unto Senator Klobuchar was vouchsafed the vision of a meaningless but face-saving “compromise” allowing the trafficking bill (and therewith the Lynch nomination) to proceed. The ant-trafficking bill was adopted by the full Senate on Wednesday in a 99-0 vote.

Klobuchar’s epiphany probably arrived too late for the hardcover edition of her forthcoming book, but Klobuchar’s comment will serve handily in the new afterword for the paperback edition next year: “It was helpful that everyone got away because people were fighting, cats and dogs, and so I think it gave people some time to think about it. Literally, when I got away from here, I thought, wait a minute, why can’t we just do it like this? … Maybe it’s because you’re out there in these cafes and you start thinking common sense, like how can we take care of this?”

For Senator Klobuchar and her friends at the Star Tribune, there is nothing like home cooking.

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