Klobuchar taking a centrist path to the White House in a field of left-leaning candidates

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is a liberal Democrat by her voting record, but compared with some of her more left-leaning competitors running for president, she passes for a centrist. Medicare for All? She supports it — as an “aspirational” goal. But as president, she would focus first on enabling more people to buy into Medicare or Medicaid as a way to have every American covered by health insurance. The Green New Deal? Sure, Klobuchar is a co-sponsor of the nonbinding proposal backed by first-term Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that calls for the U.S. to run on 100 percent renewable energy within 10 years.

But when headlining a climate change roundtable Tuesday in San Francisco, Klobuchar focused on the more immediate actions she would take if elected — starting with returning the United States to the Paris climate change accords that President Trump withdrew the nation from in 2017. Then she would reinstate Obama-era regulations on clean power and automobile mileage standards that the Trump administration scaled back. “I would push those because you could get some immediate gains from that,” Klobuchar told The Chronicle Tuesday on the “It’s All Political” podcast.

She isn’t worried that her more pragmatic approach will be overshadowed by her rivals proposing major overhauls of the nation’s health care and industrial systems. “I support bold moves, I’m also being honest about trying to find common ground where we can,” Klobuchar said. “That doesn’t mean the bold things won’t happen. It doesn’t mean that you won’t get there. But right now we’re at a standstill. The only way we get action is by getting there to begin with.” “It is not economics versus the environment,” Klobuchar said of how climate change doubters frequently try to cast the debate. What will resonate with skeptical Americans is explaining how more frequent wildfires and floods are contributing to skyrocketing insurance rates. “If we do nothing, we have major economic problems.”

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“Among the six Democratic presidential candidates serving in the Senate, only Klobuchar of Minnesota was rated as bipartisan,” according to an annual bipartisan index ranking released Tuesday by the Lugar Center, led by former Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, and Georgetown University’s law school. Overall, the study ranked Klobuchar at 23rd out of the 100 senators it scored. The index measures how often a member of Congress introduced bills that succeeded in attracting co-sponsors who belong to the other party, and how often they co-sponsor legislation introduced from the other side of the aisle. Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney was the most bipartisan candidate in the Democratic field, according to the index.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Klobuchar-taking-a-centrist-path-to-the-White-13701811.php