There are good and bad bosses everywhere, but a congressional bad boss is a thing to behold and to worry about. Congressional offices are small and generally staffed with a Congress-creatures’ true believers (or, often as not, the half-wit children of donors). If this is how people with a lot of power treat “their” people, what happens if they get even more power over a lot of other people?
Thus, we come to the question of presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. She has finished surprisingly well in Iowa and New Hampshire. A number of conservative Never Trumpers are warming to her as the last, best hope to save the Republic from the Scylla and Charybdis of Donald Trump vs. Bernie Sanders.
The phrase “bad boss” is a bit elastic, but it’s as close as Washington comes to a shibboleth. It’s also nonpartisan: Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is the Babe Ruth of bad bosses, but the early returns on New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are that she’s a good, possibly even great, boss.
Klobuchar, by all accounts, is not just a bad boss; she’s a bad boss’s bad boss. Flying binders, salad combs, 3 a.m. emails — these aren’t the hallmarks of a “tough boss,” as Klobuchar claims, but of a psychopath, one who revels in the humiliation and degradation of people who are desperate to please her.
There are some 2.1 million federal workers. We can argue over whether that’s too many, but there they are. Many of them have either unions or civil service laws (or both) and know how to use them. If Klobuchar treats her “own” people the way she does, how will she handle a bureaucracy nearly half the population of her own state? How, for that matter, will she treat the staff of her former congressional colleagues, who may have their own ideas about whether messengers should be shot?
Of course, there is a horrible asymmetry here. The political class lacks a vocabulary for what Trump is, and “bad boss” doesn’t even come close. But that doesn’t let Klobuchar off the hook. Her winks about being “driven,” “of demanding more of myself,” won’t do. Most appalling is watching some liberals cheer on her nastiness, thinking it’s an answer to Trumpism, when, in fact, it’s just a horrible copy of him.
Love him or hate him, one of the worst things about Trump is that he doesn’t even pretend to have an instinct for self-criticism, let alone self-correction: He is who he is, and if you don’t like it, then it’s your own (triggered) fault.
If Klobuchar is serious about “standing up” to Trump, she could differentiate herself instantly by making a sincere apology to the people she’s hurt, and to offer a plan of her own to govern her basest instincts before she presumes to govern anything else.
Bill Myers (@billcaphill) lives and works in Washington. Email him at [email protected].
