Days before she announced her 2020 presidential run, Amy Klobuchar’s “Minnesota nice” reputation was complicated by reporting via anonymous aides who recounted how the senator had berated them to the point of tears, e-mailed them at all hours, and chucked a binder across the room. (Though, a staffer qualified, Klobuchar hadn’t aimed at anyone in particular.) A furious debate ensued. Did Klobuchar’s behavior constitute abuse? Would she be held to the same standards if she were a man? Rather than dodge the maelstrom, the senator plunged right in. “Yes, I can be tough, and yes, I can push people,” she explained in the aftermath of her campaign launch. “I have high expectations for the people that work for me. But I have high expectations for this country.”

So far, reframing the debate seems to have worked for Klobuchar, which is to say her campaign is still chugging along, with no signs of stopping. And in an interview with CNN on Friday, she took things a step further. “One can always do better, and that means you want to be sure that you are listening to people if they felt that something was unfair, or they felt bad about something,” she said. “But I still think that you have to demand good product. When you’re out there on the world stage and dealing with people like Vladimir Putin, yeah, you want someone who’s tough. You want someone that demands the answers and that’s going to get things done, and that’s what I’ve done my whole life.”

That innate toughness, she implied, will likewise translate to her dealings with Donald Trump, who mocked her as a “Snowman(woman)” on the day of her campaign launch. “One of the things he tries to do is to sidetrack people into what he’s talking about that day,” she said. “Sometimes, you respond to him, especially when he is picking at core values or saying divisive things that divide people in this country. But sometimes, you don’t respond to him at all, let him go off and rant and rave about whatever he wants to. And then, the third [thing], is to do it sometimes with humor, which is what I did the day that I announced.” (At the time, Klobuchar tweeted a snowman emoji along with the zinger, “I wonder how your hair would fare in a blizzard.” Nailed it.)

Whether this tactic works for Klobuchar in the long run remains to be seen. So far, the Minnesota lawmaker is still relatively unknown to American voters, despite a well-received standoff with Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, which earned her some national attention and greased the presidential rumor mill. There are some benefits for Klobuchar in being a blank slate, of course, but not when The New York Times is publishing surreal anecdotes about how she allegedly ate a salad with a comb when an aide “fumbled” her fork, and then forced him to clean it afterward. “When nobody knows you, everything is potentially damaging, if there’s a constant drumbeat of negative stories,” Mo Elleithee, a Democratic strategist, explained to my colleague Chris Smith last month, as the tide of reports crested.

Could the staffing issue eventually be used against her? Certainly, added former Obama pollster Cornell Belcher: “If you come across as cruel or mean, I know it’s not going to play well in a primary with a liberal base of voters who are hypersensitive about issues of equity and fairness.” For now, though, Klobuchar’s “tough” play has gone unchallenged. And if she can successfully parlay it into foreign-policy bona fides, she may just survive the first hurdle of her candidacy. After all, Americans seem pretty tired of having a Kremlin lapdog in the White House.

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