Senator can handle flack over treatment of staff
The bad female boss. Ooh, that’s always a delicious, wicked and unfortunately irresistible caricature. Sometimes it’s even true.
Think of the popular 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada, in which Meryl Streep played, to tyrannical perfection, a terrifying editor-in-chief of a celebrated fashion magazine. Her character, Miranda Priestly was said to be based on real life and famously frosty Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
Now there’s a political Bad Female Boss about whom former staffers are dishing so publicly it just might derail her nascent campaign to be the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential nominee.
No it’s not Hillary Clinton, who may have been unfairly savaged by the right and in the media for being “unlikeable” and “untrustworthy” along with those damn emails. She was reputedly quite nice to her staff and had their loyalty to prove it.
That’s apparently not the case with Minnesota’s senior Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, the subject of several recent media pieces claiming she treats her staff abusively.
The most authoritative look at how Klobuchar appears to have an anger management problem and dehumanizes her staff was an eyebrow raising New York Times article last week that sparked a debate as to whether these anonymous allegations were holding Klobuchar to a higher and therefore sexist standard in a notoriously stressful business rife with badly behaved bosses.
It’s a debate worth having, but first let’s have some details.
Klobuchar, 58, and a former prosecutor, projects an aura of “Minnesota nice,” along with political moderation and physical hardiness — she actually announced her campaign for the nomination outside in a snow blizzard.
She has been viewed by many as a possible threat to Donald Trump in 2020 precisely because her public appearances show a politician who is selfdisciplined, rational and knowledgeable.
Contrast that with the Amy Klobuchar portrayed in the opening paragraphs of that New York Times piece:
“Senator Amy Klobuchar was hungry, forkless and losing patience.
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.
Then she handed the comb to her staff member with a directive: Clean it.”
In a word, yecch. Although I confess I was with her up to the “clean it” moment. She was no doubt hangry, but she demonstrated a level of admirable ingenuity by eating her salad with her comb.
It’s the blaming and shaming of others that’s a problem, as well as, of course, demanding a staffer do your personal dirty work. Clean it yourself! As in most workplaces, rules in the Senate prohibit a boss asking anyone to do a personal errand.
There were other examples of Klobuchar yelling, throwing things, demeaning her hard working staffers and even interfering in them trying to move to new jobs. In fact, she has one of the highest staff turnover rates on Capitol Hill.
The Times article gave birth to silly satirical analyses about which comb would be best to eat a salad with. But it also prompted readers to protest the attacks as sexist, and to say it’s Klobuchar’s fair-minded policies that matter.
I don’t think it was sexist to point out with substantial reporting that she has a reputation as an abusive boss.
We’ve reached a point as a society in which, if we’re not going to tolerate bullying or treating people badly in other ways, we have to include the potential leader of a country in this demand for better behaviour.
Hasn’t Trump’s erratic, ag- gressive and demeaning behaviour toward anyone who doesn’t agree with him reinforced this point?
Bad female bosses exist— although simple math dictates there are far more male bosses to be had out there. Someone I know who worked for a former federal cabinet minister told me his boss, once, in a fit of rage, threw something at him that could have physically injured him. All instances of physical aggression in a work place should not be tolerated.
There are too many anecdotes and allegations out there about Klobuchar’s questionable behaviour to put it down to simple sexism or a double standard. We shouldn’t tolerate any female or male boss who constantly verbally abuses underlings.
The trick is agreeing that such behaviour in a presidential candidate is disqualifying. I mean, surely if serious standards of decent behaviour were important to voters, Trump would have been thrown out of the 2016 race after he publicly mocked a disabled reporter.
Klobuchar responded at a CNN forum to various allegations saying she has “high expectations,” is a “tough” boss and may have “pushed people too hard.”
She may need to go further and promise to take a more serious look at the way she behaved. And indicate how she’s changed. (She also ran an effective state prosecution office and managed hundreds of attorneys.)
Unless the allegations are proven to be false or exaggerated, they are a clear warning to her and others out there.
How you treat people matters. All the time. Nothing going forward will make it matter less. It has nothing to do with having a temper, high expectations or occasionally melting down.
Abusiveness is unacceptable. If the #MeToo movement has resulted in zero tolerance for male bosses sexually harassing women, and otherwise using their power to create untenable situations, then female bosses must be held to the same standard.
Of course it’s unfair that men got away with their far more seriously abusive behaviour for so damn long, and women, clearly in the ascendancy, but barely out of the gate, are going to be nailed for it in a heartbeat.
But we can handle it. That’s the price we pay for progress.
Twitter: @judithtimson