Amy Klobuchar’s carpe diem moment is here (opinion)

I’m a Minnesota progressive voter. I voted for Klobuchar happily enough in ’06 and ’18 (in ’12 I was living in Chicago), but she’s never been the local politician who most represents my views. We’re a weird state with strange politics, electing a wide-range of politicians — from Michele Bachmann to Jesse Ventura to Ilhan Omar.

Tina Smith, who replaced former comedian Al Franken, is a former president of Planned Parenthood. The new governor, Tim Walz, used to be a schoolteacher and football coach in the southern part of the state. Klobuchar just hasn’t had to spend a lot of time catering to the left, because Minnesotans seem eager to support her even when her ideas aren’t lockstep in line with our most progressive voters.

The truth is that if any Democrat can win over Trump voters, it’s probably Klobuchar.

So instead of reaching to the right, what would it look like to hear Amy Klobuchar, a woman who knows how to win, try to win more votes from left-wing Democrats on the strength of her ideas? I’ve been trying to reach out to the Klobuchar campaign for the last six weeks to try to get them to tell me what their pitch looks like, but to no avail.

I’d like to know whether there’s a positive centrist vision for America beyond the premise that it will be easier to achieve.

We know that the problems facing our country are vast in scale and supported by entrenched and dangerous forces. Folks in the center need to make an affirmative case that their ideas are the best, most practical, but also sufficient answers to those challenges. It may be too late for any move to vault my senator up from fifth place among those who take the stage for the next debate, but the effort would make for a better campaign — one more focused on fixing problems, rather than indulging the fantasy that a large number of Trump voters will suddenly come to their senses.