Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar visited Pittsburgh Wednesday with stops at a union training center and an Oakland burger bar – a symbol of a campaign that hopes to connect with voters of varying stripes.
“I don’t want to shut people out,” the Minnesota senator told reporters at the Carpenters Training Center in Robinson Township. “I want to bring with me our fired-up Democratic base, as well as our independents and moderate Republicans who didn't get what they bargained for” when they voted for President Trump in 2016.
Klobuchar's visit follows earlier appearances in Pittsburgh by Vice President Joe Biden, and fellow Senators Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand (though Gillibrand later dropped out of the race). And she offered criticisms of Trump that connected with an enthusiastic evening crowd at Oakland’s Stack’d Burgers & Beer.
Trump, she said, was “a guy that would rather lie than lead, that is running this country like a game show.” She blasted him as someone who “goes after people of color, he goes after the city of Baltimore, he goes after African-American elected officials. After Charlottesville [where a march populated by white nationalists led to violence and the death of an anti-racist protester], it was this president who said there were two sides. There are not two sides when the other side is the Ku Klux Klan."
But while Klobuchar offered an unsparing critique of Trump, she said it was important to reach out to those who voted for him. And some of her remarks amounted to an implicit criticism of rival Democrats who have offered up more ambitious progressive policies to the party base. Democrats would win by “not just going to the easy areas, not just going to the blue areas, but going to the purple and red areas, and going not just where it’s comfortable but where it’s uncomfortable,” Klobuchar told the crowd in Oakland.
Neither union halls nor college campuses are exactly terra incognita for Democrats. But Klobuchar was able to negotiate terrain some of her rivals would have struggled with. During a tour of the Carpenters facility, union officials talked up the jobs created for union members by Pennsylvania’s natural-gas industry. Klobuchar, unlike some other Democrats, has not called for a ban on gas-drilling, though she supports restoring other aspects of President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, like re-entering an international pact to address climate change.
Klobuchar is a popular figure in Minnesota, a state which has been reliably blue for generations but which Trump came within less than 2 percentage points of winning in 2016.
“One of the things that has really bothered me about Donald Trump is that he made a bunch of promises to people in my state, especially in northern Minnesota where he got a bunch of votes,” she told reporters. “[H]e made a bunch of promises to these workers and to these families and to our farmers in rural areas that he hasn’t kept.”
By contrast, she said, she was able to carry even conservative areas because “I look people in the eye and tell them the truth.”
Some of that candor was on display during her visit to Pittsburgh. While she has ambitious plans for making college more affordable, she demurred from proposals to make college free – a popular promise from the race’s most progressive candidates.
"We want to make it easier for you to go to college,” she told reporters, “but we're not going to do it off the back of the working people … and making them pay for college for a bunch of rich kids."
Klobuchar would seek to make one- or two-year degree programs free – which she said would expand access to a fast-growing market in skilled trade jobs – while also expanding access to Pell Grants, and allowing students to refinance their loans more easily.
Klobuchar takes a similarly middling course – to the left of what President Obama was able to achieve, but to the right of some Democratic rivals this year – on health care. She favors a creating a nonprofit “public option” to provide cheaper health insurance options, but opposes the kind of “Medicare for All” proposals offered by Bernie Sanders.
Klobuchar has thus far trailed much of the Democratic field, although she was talking up a poll out this week that showed her support in the critical early state of Iowa doubling – to 8 percent – in recent days.
“I always tell people, if you are tired of the nonsense and the noise in our politics, and you are tired of the extremes in our politics and you are looking for something different, then you have a home with me,” she told the crowd in Oakland, echoing a standout moment in a recent Democratic debate. “Because I may not be the loudest voice up on that debate stage, but I am betting that that’s not what America wants right now. We already have that in the White House.”
Klobuchar’s Oakland gathering was swelled by students who were members of a campus Democratic group, who stood side-by-side with older supporters. The crowd swelled onto the sidewalk, thanks in part to a venue that was much smaller than, say, Sanders’ rally on Schenley Plaza earlier this year. And some supporters said they appreciated Klobuchar as a progressive who nevertheless wasn't promising voters the moon.
“She's rational. She looks at issues from all angles, and doesn’t hype people up with things that aren’t possible,” said Elizabeth Rodenz of Shadyside. Rodenz pointed to Klobuchar’s popularity in Minnesota, and her grilling of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings, as evidence she would be a fierce campaigner.
“It’s unfortunate that she’s been overshadowed by hype politics,” Rodenz said.
Klobuchar told the Oakland crowd that she’d be hitting states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin again. She will be visiting the latter two states as part of what she is calling a “Blue Wall Tour.”
“We’re building this blue wall, and we’re going to make Donald Trump pay for it,” she said, playing off Donald Trump’s ultimately empty pledge to make Mexico pay for a border wall.
As the crowd cheered, she said as an aside, “That’s pretty good. You like that? This is one of the things you’ve got to do to him -- just turn it on him.”
