Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat elected in 2006, is Minnesota’s senior senator and the fourth occupant of this Senate seat in as many elections. Klobuchar (KLO-bu-shar) was born in the Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth, the daughter of longtime Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Jim Klobuchar. She graduated from Yale, where she wrote a senior paper on the machinations behind the building of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. She went on to get a law degree from the University of Chicago. Returning home, she worked as a lawyer and a lobbyist. In 1998, Klobuchar ran for Hennepin County attorney and defeated the sister of 3rd District U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad, a Republican, in the general election. She served two terms as county attorney, was president of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association, and took credit for spearheading a crackdown on gun crimes and for securing nearly 300 homicide convictions. Read More

Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat elected in 2006, is Minnesota’s senior senator and the fourth occupant of this Senate seat in as many elections. Klobuchar (KLO-bu-shar) was born in the Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth, the daughter of longtime Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Jim Klobuchar. She graduated from Yale, where she wrote a senior paper on the machinations behind the building of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. She went on to get a law degree from the University of Chicago. Returning home, she worked as a lawyer and a lobbyist. In 1998, Klobuchar ran for Hennepin County attorney and defeated the sister of 3rd District U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad, a Republican, in the general election. She served two terms as county attorney, was president of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association, and took credit for spearheading a crackdown on gun crimes and for securing nearly 300 homicide convictions.

Minneapolis’s Hennepin County is the center of a media market that includes most of Minnesota’s population, providing Klobuchar an excellent springboard to run for the Senate in 2006 after Mark Dayton announced he would not seek re-election. Quickly, 6th District Republican Rep. Mark Kennedy made it clear he was running. He was fresh from defeating well-known and well-financed Democratic challenger Patty Wetterling; Sen. Norm Coleman and other Minnesota Republicans quickly united behind his candidacy.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party field took time to shake out. Klobuchar was the first to formally announce her candidacy in April. Several other prominent DLFers decided against running, including former Vice President Walter Mondale and radio talk-show host Al Franken. Wetterling pondered the race but decided to run in the open 6th District instead. Minnesota Heart Institute Research Foundation President Ford Bell did run but dropped out after Klobuchar received the party endorsement at the DFL state convention in June.

Kennedy sought to distance himself from the Iraq war and President George W. Bush, by then an unpopular Republican president. He ran an ad listing issues on which he voted against the Bush administration and promised to be independent. He tried to portray Klobuchar as another ineffective liberal, questioning the number of cases she actually prosecuted and highlighting the increasing rate of violent crime in Minneapolis. But all this was unavailing in what turned out to be a heavily Democratic year. Klobuchar called Kennedy a “rubber stamp for President Bush” and called for middle-class tax relief and an increase in the minimum wage. She emphasized her tough-on-crime credentials as a prosecutor. Klobuchar consistently led in polls and won 58%-38%, the biggest Minnesota Senate victory since 1978—only twice did Hubert Humphrey win by a margin that big. She swept the Iron Range, won 2-to-1 in the Twin Cities core counties and carried suburban Dakota, Anoka and Washington Counties handily.

Klobuchar launched her Senate term by announcing she would not accept gifts, meals, or trips from private groups or individuals, regardless of whether congressional rules allow them—an attempt to set herself apart from recent congressional scandals. She instituted “Minnesota Mornings,” to meet every Thursday the Senate is in session with visiting Minnesotans for coffee and potica, a traditional Slovenian holiday nut roll, a reminder of her ethnic heritage and Iron Range roots.

Her top issue was product safety. In 2007, after a 6-year-old sustained serious injuries from a swimming pool drain in St. Louis Park, Klobuchar and 3rd District Republican Jim Ramstad sponsored a bill banning swimming pool covers that fail to meet entrapment safety standards and requiring automatic drain shutoffs. It was signed into law in December. After news stories described the discovery of lead in children’s toys made in China, she sponsored provisions in the Senate child safety bill that banned lead in children’s products including clothes and a requirement that toys contain batch numbers to make recalls easier. She served on the conference committee that negotiated the final version, which raised the age for which products were regulated from 7 to 12 years old and became law in 2008. Klobuchar also sponsored a bill to prosecute online stalkers and to require schools to have anti-bullying policies. To the dismay of her teenage daughter, she sponsored a bill requiring states driver’s license laws to allow learner’s permits at 16, restrictions on the number of passengers at 17 and full licenses only at 18.

With a seat on the Agriculture Committee, Klobuchar had a role in drafting the 2008 farm bill. She got into the final version a provision creating incentives for farmers to switch from carbohydrate-based crops like corn to cellulosic crops like switch grass to make ethanol. She pushed for a transition from the ethanol blender’s tax credit to an ethanol producer’s tax credit, with a reduction of the import tariff from 54 cents to 36 cents. With Wyoming Republican Mike Enzi, she co-sponsored an easing of restrictions on travel to Cuba. After gasoline prices spiked in May 2008, she backed a windfall profits tax on oil companies and in September, joined a bipartisan group pushing to permit states to allow offshore oil drilling along their coasts. On the financial industry regulation overhaul that passed in 2010, she and Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison successfully moved to maintain regional Federal Reserve banks’ supervision of community banks.

With West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller, Klobuchar co-sponsored a bill requiring cell phone companies to allow free termination of contracts within 30 days and prorated termination fees after that. “Sometimes I feel as if I work for these companies because I know all the dead spots on Interstate 35,” she said. “If I know, the companies should know. And they should provide this information to consumers before they enter into a contract.” Within six months, the companies announced they would prorate termination fees. She continued to complain about early termination fees on “smart” phone contracts, and expressed concern that Google’s collection of data from unsecured wireless networks violated consumers’ privacy.

Klobuchar has developed a reputation as a resident wit in Washington. She was a hit as a speaker at a national press dinner in 2009, joking that while she held the Senate record for raising money from ex-boyfriends, the House record belonged to Barney Frank. (The Massachusetts Democrat is openly gay.) She kidded about her status as Minnesota’s only senator from January to July 2009 and the state’s notoriously cold climate: While litigation continued over the outcome of the nail-biter 2008 Senate race, she predicted, wrongly, that it would be settled by the time the ice was out of Minnesota’s Lake Minnetonka in April. She extended that prediction to when the ice cracks on Rainy Lake in May.

After the Democrats’ drubbing at the polls in 2010, Klobuchar offered her analysis in The Washington Post. “The people of this country want more bipartisanship. They want the government to run better,” she said. “They want us to help the private sector create jobs. That was the message out of the election, and we’d better heed it.” She is up for re-election in 2012. A December 2010 poll showed her with a 59%-29% favorable-to-unfavorable rating.