The Audacity of Minnesota

She is scary smart (and not just because she graduated from Yale in political science and then went to law school at the University of Chicago). She has managed in her first couple of years in the Senate to be disarmingly effective. "Klobuchar conquered the learning curve very quickly," says Jennifer Duffy, who covers the Senate for the political insider bible The Cook Political Report. "She plays well with others, not just her colleagues but across the aisle. I've yet to encounter anyone either in the Senate or who does business with the Senate who doesn't like her, and that goes a long way."

She can also be a hard-ass, in a good way. Like when she consistently digs her heels in on consumer-protection issues despite the fact that Minnesota's big corporations helped her get elected. You don't get to the Senate by being a wuss. But somehow she also manages to placate. And the most important thing, even though it sounds corny: There's a sincere happiness about Klobuchar. She laughs constantly. She giggles. She does not project the typical guarded let-me-think-about-this-before-I-answer politician response. Her sportswriter father, Jim Klobuchar, who attended the luncheon in Minneapolis, told me when I asked him to sum up what makes Amy different: "There's a lot of joy in her. She has an eye for the absurdities of life. And that reflects itself in a lot of ways." He is correct.

Later that night, Amy's in the backseat of a car headed to the president's house. Well, the president of the University of Minnesota, but still. In the course of the evening, she'll hit all the Minnesota talking points (Brett Favre: "A natural leader," she declares. Target: Of course she shops there! It's a Minnesota company! "I plug Target every chance I get." The new commuter train to Big Lake? That she just happened to help fund? What's not to love?).

Inside Eastcliff, the president's preciously appointed, twinkle-lighted sprawling white manor, a diverse and earnest group from the humanitarian organization CARE and its well-heeled patrons are awaiting the senator's arrival. These are good libs, the kind of folks who keep Amy's job-approval rating at 58 percent or higher. They still remember everything she did as the powerful Hennepin County prosecutor, particularly for the families of murdered children, her long track record on women's causes, her success at making drunk driving a felony in Minnesota, and her crusade to get toxic products from China off the shelves of U.S. toy stores, and how, when the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis horrifically collapsed into the Mississippi River in August '07, it was Amy, the newly minted senator, whose first response was to voice what everyone across the country was thinking as they sat, shell-shocked, watching CNN: "A bridge just shouldn't fall down in the middle of America." Her second response was to kick every butt possible in order to get the federal funding needed to rebuild the bridge; it was back up in 13 months. In Minnesota, they don't forget these sorts of things.

Amy begins her remarks to the CARE group following several anguished speeches from workers who've returned from the fields of the world's atrocities by telling a story about the last time she was at Eastcliff. Her daughter Abigail, who's now 14, was a wee thing at the time and, all agog at the president's house, went wandering off. "When we found her, my daughter was opening up his wife's underwear drawer!" The crowd—so serious up till this point— bursts into laughter.

Abigail is a running set piece for Amy's speeches. There's a thing about telling stories about your kids when you're a politician. They either hit the exact right tone or (see Senator Scott Brown) bomb in cringeinducing fashion. Amy almost always manages to hit the right tone. "And when we got in the car, I said, `Honey, do you know what you were in?' And she said—and yes, this is a girl who learned to read too young—`I was in her LING-oray drawer, Mom.' " More laughter. Then she proceeds to thank the CARE people for being a moral force in the world.

Amy's only child was born with a condition that kept her from being able to swallow. For three years she had to be fed through a stomach tube. But 24 hours after she was born, "they threw me out of the hospital, which is horrible even if your baby's not sick," Amy recalls, sipping a glass of chardonnay with a group of women after the Eastcliff speech. That was when she, then "just" a working mom, albeit a corporate lawyer mom, used her lawyer contacts to get an audience before the state legislature and successfully lobbied Minnesota to pass one of the first laws in the country guaranteeing new moms and their babies a 48-hour hospital stay. Her first foray into governance was quite a success: President Clinton later made it a federal law. "I had to go and testify about things like your water breaking," she says, "so I told them very detailed things to make them feel squeamish so they'd pass the bill the right way." But the best part, Amy says with relish, was "when some lobbyists wanted to delay the time until the bill took effect." So she took six of her "closest pregnant friends" with her to appear before the legislature. "When they asked when this bill should take effect, all my pregnant friends raised their hands and said, `Now.' " Of course, it worked.

Now the ladies of Eastcliff want to know when she's going to run for president. "Yeah, yeah, right," Amy says. No, really. "Let us know when you're going to announce."

"Right now," she says, "I'm going to announce that I'm getting some food."

The next morning in Minnesota, at 7:45, two of Amy's frightfully young female staffers pull up to the senator's house in a working-class neighborhood six blocks from where the bridge collapsed. Chez Klobuchar is a very modest two-story affair with gray aluminum siding and a screened-in porch. Amy says she and her husband have, let's see, "our 401(k)s. We have some in a college fund for Abigail. We have this house, and we have two 10-year-old Saturns. We have no income property; we have no stock."

She does have a Kindle, which she is simultaneously working (plowing through the morning papers) while applying lip gloss and eating her breakfast (a handful of raspberries) as she gets into the car. She's wearing one of the variations of the Amy outfit—today it's black pants instead of the black skirt, and a pale pink blazer. She looks pretty. "Ha!" she says. "I understand now why Hillary Clinton always wore navy blue pantsuits. Remember, for four years? If you have one or two themes, then you have the same shoes, the same bag. Otherwise, it's a nightmare. Because you don't have time for all the..." she waves her hands. "Of course, she had more help, I think."

This Is A Developing Story

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