Tag Archives: Amy Klobuchar

NY Times double endorsement: a head-scratcher

The fuddy-duddy in me is making me scratch my noggin over the New York Times’s decision to split its endorsement in the Democratic Party presidential primary, offering its nod to two of the challengers remaining in the still-large field.

The Times, admitting it was “breaking with convention,” went with U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for the party’s nomination. Warren is a champion of the party’s liberal/progressive wing, while Klobuchar bears the standard for the party’s more moderate wing. Therefore, the Times figured, why choose just one of ’em? They went with both.

Here’s where this endorsement strategy breaks down for me. Only one of them can emerge as the party nominee this summer. One candidate will get the nomination and will face Donald John Trump, the current president who is seeking re-election.

I am going to presume — and this is no giant leap into the unknown — that the Times likely will endorse whoever is running against Trump. Why won’t the Times take the leap that Democratic voters all across the land in primary states are going to take? They can’t choose two candidates. Voters’ choice is limited to just one.

A few years before resigning from my final job as a daily print journalist I enacted a policy that did away with endorsing in party primaries when there was a contest in the other party. The Amarillo Globe-News decided to make endorsements only in those primary races where there was no candidate waiting for the nominee in the fall. In the Texas Panhandle, that almost always meant that Republicans would have contested primaries while Democratic primaries had no candidates on the ballot.

My thought then was that primary contests generally are the work of political parties. A one-party primary, though, was tantamount to election. Thus, we would weigh in on a primary.

In all the years I interviewed political candidates and wrote editorials offering a newspaper recommendation on who voters ought to choose, I never wrote a two-fer.  My thought always has been that if we’re going to ask voters to make a choice, then the newspaper ought to show the same level of courage … and make a single choice.

Here is the Times editorial: You make the call.

I won’t argue the merits of the candidates’ points of view. I merely question a great newspaper’s decision to hedge on a critically important decision.

Sen. Klobuchar needs to tread carefully

I happen to agree with Meghan McCain, the outspoken daughter of an outspoken late U.S. senator.

Meghan McCain is asking U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, to stop using her father, John McCain, as a political prop.

Klobuchar recently has told of how she sat next to Sen. McCain while Donald Trump was delivering his inaugural speech. She mentioned that Sen. McCain kept saying the names of infamous dictators.

As MSN.com noted: “The arc that we are on, this arc of justice, started the day after that dark inauguration,” Klobuchar said. “The day when I sat on that stage between Bernie (Sanders) and John McCain and John McCain kept reciting to me the names of dictators during that speech, because he knew more than any of us what we were facing as a nation. He understood it. He knew because he knew this man more than any of us.”

Sen. Klobuchar intended to honor the memory of Sen. McCain. I am pretty certain that in Meghan McCain’s mind, she has given Donald Trump grist to fire at the memory of the late senator, who the president already has said — since the senator’s death in August 2018 — he has “never liked.”

Trump hasn’t been bashful about criticizing Sen. McCain, even in death. That criticism continues to rankle Meghan McCain, who has been not bashful at all in expressing her disdain for the president or her undying love and admiration for her late father.

Meghan McCain said via Twitter: “On behalf of the entire McCain family (Senator Klobuchar), please be respectful to all of us and leave my father’s legacy and memory out of presidential politics.”

OK, so Meghan McCain hasn’t mentioned the president’s penchant for petulant patter, even toward her beloved father. There should be little doubt that she doesn’t want to hear Donald Trump insult her father any longer.

The president has said quite enough already about a man — John McCain — whose legacy of public service will last far longer than anything Donald Trump will ever do for as long as he is an active politician.

What’s with this Sen. Klobuchar ‘toughness’?

What the hell is going on here? Media reporting keeps harping about how “tough” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a declared Democratic Party candidate for president, is on her staff.

Now there’s this bit: She supposedly berated a staff member for failing to bring eating utensils; thus, Klobuchar was “forced” to eat a salad with — get this! — a comb.

A comb? What?

This social media gossip is getting weirder by the day.

I shudder to think what we’re going to hear about all the candidates once this 2020 campaign gets really heated up.

Hold on, folks. It’s gonna get bumpy. Real bumpy!