Salad Fiend Amy Klobuchar Once Berated an Aide for Forgetting a ForkThe latest in a series of reports on the Minnesota senator’s treatment of her staff includes a ludicrous anecdote, now apparently confirmed, in which she ate a salad with a comb. But the questions swirling around Klobuchar’s candidacy for president aren’t a joke.
By Tina Nguyen
February 22, 2019
... Klobuchar has mostly brushed off reports that she’s hurled a binder at a staffer and yelled at employees until they cried, acknowledging that she “can be tough,†but that she is passionate about her work and demands excellence. ...
On Friday, The New York Times submitted its own contribution to the rapidly growing genre with a deeply sourced report that escalates Klobuchar’s reputation from merely vicious—she had the highest level of staff turnover at her Senate office between 2001 and 2016, according to publicly available information—to occasionally cruel. Her family-leave policy, for instance, reportedly required staffers to pay back the salary earned during their leave, and that they work three times as many weeks as they’d taken off. (A spokesperson said her office “never made staff pay back any of their leave,†and that the language around the policy would be amended.) She reportedly lashed out over things small (the words “straight-shooting†and “absolutelyâ€) and large (a staffer’s perceived inadequacies “ruining†her marriage). And she knows how to deliver the sort of devastating bon mot that would make Armando Iannucci weep. On one occasion, she told a team member, “I would trade three of you for a bottle of water.â€
The Times’s opening anecdote, in particular, reads like a Veep parody: An aide, joining her on a trip to South Carolina in 2008, had procured a salad for his boss while hauling their bags through an airport terminal. But once onboard, he delivered the grim news: He had fumbled the plastic eating utensils before reaching the gate, and the crew did not have any forks on such a short flight.
What happened next was typical: Ms. Klobuchar berated her aide instantly for the slip-up. What happened after that was not: She pulled a comb from her bag and began eating the salad with it, according to four people familiar with the episode. ...
Vanity FairI have a feeling DJT would mention this incident a time or two if Gropin' Joe were to pick her for his running mate.
