The Register's editorial

After meeting with U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Des Moines Register editorial board member made this observation: It sure would be nice to see this smart, competent senator representing Iowa, not Minnesota.

Nods all around.

Except Klobuchar's relocation plan is to move to the big white house in Washington, D.C.

The Democratic presidential candidate, with a voice rough from campaign speeches, seemed right at home with Register reporters and editors.

Perhaps because her father was a newspaperman.

Perhaps because she’s spent decades answering questions and working rooms — as a lawyer, prosecutor and the first woman elected to represent Minnesota in the Senate.

After spilling a little java on the conference room table, which she called a “coffee malfunction,” she delved right into issues with remarkable detail — easily summoning names, dollar figures, rankings and statistics from memory.

When asked why she was running for president, she talked about the Interstate 35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007, which killed 13 people. Victims worked to save one another. Politicians, including her, came together to fund and expedite construction.

“That is American spirit,” Klobuchar said. “That is a country bigger than any individual.” The current president “doesn’t seem to see that heart of America or that spirit.”

There is a crisis of trust in this country, she said, and people feel separated from each other and their government. That is not how it’s supposed to be.

Klobuchar supports health care reform that brings down prices, gets more people insured and uses a public option such as Medicare or Medicaid to expand coverage. She relished having more time than debates allow to talk about pharmaceutical legislation and a Minnesota man who died after rationing his insulin.

Big Pharma has two lobbyists for every member of Congress, she said, and politicians need to stand up to the industry.

This is the kind of common-sense message that should resonate with Democrats and Republicans. In fact, much of what Klobuchar says transcends political divides. The proof of that: She was easily re-elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012 and 2018, carrying even conservative areas of Minnesota.

She embraces bipartisanship in revitalizing rural communities — citing steps such as securing funding for hospitals, welcoming immigrant labor and ensuring internet access. If you can get broadband next to a volcano in Iceland, we should be able to get it in Nebraska, she said.

Though we had only an hour with her, it was clear she could spend days detailing the intricacies of everything from the farm bill and biofuels to carbon pricing and trade policy. She made an economic case for immigration reform, something the current president should be doing.

Yet she said lawmakers are afraid of Trump, a man who “literally wakes up and tweets to divide people. That’s how he makes news. He pisses off the entire country of Denmark, which isn’t easy to do. But he did it.”

She’s good with one-liners, and her quick-witted sense of humor reared its head more than once: "What’s the difference between Greenland and Donald Trump? Only one of them is for sale."

She recognized China has been a bad actor, manipulating currency, stealing intellectual property and committing other misdeeds. Then she went on to illustrate Trump's erratic and misguided approach by citing the dates of his flip-flops in the past month, which contribute to the “chaos in our trade policy.”

A graduate of Yale University and the University of Chicago Law School, she said she has great respect for judges and the courts.

Iowans may remember her exchange last year with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during a Senate hearing. Klobuchar asked him if he’d ever blacked out while drinking and he shot back: “I don’t know. Have you?” He later apologized.

“You bring down the entire judiciary when you talk like that,” she told a Register editorial board member. She wants to bring back integrity in talking about the justice system.

Just as important, she wants to restore integrity to the White House.

“When Trump is on TV, many people turn down the volume. That wasn’t true of past presidents.” Even viewers who didn’t agree felt it was important to pay respect to the office and the individual, but that is no longer the case, she observes.

And she is likely right on the mark when she said no one would have to turn down the television volume if she is president.

— Andie Dominick