Amy ‘Salad Comb’ Klobuchar’s Town Hall On Fox

Federalist: On Wednesday night, Amy Klobuchar became the second Democratic presidential candidate to appear in a Fox News Town hall event, following Bernie Sanders’s appearance last month.

Sanders has always marched to the beat of his own drummer, but Klobuchar’s appearance on the network marks the first break in the boycott by establishment Democrats. It’s a smart strategy for a candidate who has struggled to make her voice heard amid the growing horde of candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

Here’s what we learned.

1. Heartland Amy

The senior senator from Minnesota, Klobuchar is a Midwesterner and her focus on that region came up again and again in the town hall. The event was in Milwaukee, so this tactic went over well with the Midwestern crowd, but it also addresses a problem Democrats have been puzzling over since 2016.

The vaunted “blue wall” of the Electoral College ran from New England to Pennsylvania and through the upper Midwest, plus the Pacific Coast. However attached the Democratic Party got to the neoliberal consensus the Clintons practiced, they thought they could never lose that blue wall.

They were trading on a legacy put in place by Franklin Roosevelt, in which they were the party of the worker, the miner, the famer. Indeed, the Minnesota branch of the Democratic Party still calls itself the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, a relic of the fusion politics of those days.

But FDR has not been on the ticket since 1944, and Donald Trump made a hash of the Democrats’ claim to be the workingman’s party—a claim that has had increasingly less evidence to support it over the past few decades. Hillary Clinton’s loss of Ohio, Michigan, and above all Wisconsin signaled how deep the Midwest’s disillusionment with national Democrats has gotten.

Klobuchar sees, rightly, that a Republican Party that gets the votes of the South, the Plains, and the Midwest is almost impossible to defeat. As a Midwesterner, one of the few in the race, she sees herself as the best spokesperson for the region.

How does that play out in policy terms? That’s where it gets a little fuzzy. She talks about prosperity being shared unequally, a common complaint of Trump voters. The idea that much of our economic success is being accumulated on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley is one that resounds with a lot of Americans. Klobuchar nodded at that sentiment, but offered nothing different from the Clinton campaign in actually addressing it.

2. Moderate or Progressive?

One audience question from a grad student and podcaster probed Klobuchar’s progressive bona fides. There are now nearly two dozen Democratic candidates, each leapfrogging the others for the title of Wokest of the Woke.

Klobuchar stands somewhat outside the pack. From a state that almost went for Trump in 2016, she has never had the political leeway to be a liberal firebrand, even if she were so inclined. Yet the Democratic primary electorate expects Full Socialism at all times.

Klobuchar tries to square the circle by calling herself “a proven progressive.” It’s quite similar to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 promise to be “a progressive president who gets results,” and for the same reasons.  more here