Amy Klobuchar Talks Health Care, Impeachment and, Yes, That Comb

Backstage at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where Klobuchar was the first in a series of presidential candidates to be interviewed Saturday, the interviewer, Kara Swisher, asked: “Do you want to start with the comb or end with the comb?”

“The comb” was a reference to a February New York Times article about how Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, treats her staff in the Senate. In 2008, The Times reported, an aide bought her a salad in an airport but fumbled the plastic utensils. On the plane, Klobuchar berated the aide, pulled a comb out of her purse and ate the salad with it.

“It was me sort of doing a mom thing,” Klobuchar responded at Saturday’s event, co-sponsored by The Texas Tribune. “I didn’t have a fork. I used a comb to eat a salad very briefly on a plane in a MacGyver move.”

She did not mention that, after finishing the salad, she handed the comb to the aide and ordered him to clean it.

The article, based on interviews with more than two dozen former aides, also included details about how her Senate office employees who took paid parental leave were expected to stay in their job for three times as many weeks as they had taken off — and that if they didn’t, according to an employee handbook, they would be required to pay back the money earned during their leave.

In response to the article, Klobuchar’s office said it had never enforced that policy and would change the handbook.

Klobuchar expressed support for several policies to lower drug prices, including importing products from Canada; ending the “pay for delay” practice in which big pharmaceutical companies pay manufacturers not to produce generics; and allowing the government to negotiate drug prices with Medicare, a perennial proposal from Democrats.

She criticized the relatively short sentence given to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, declaring, “You can’t have two systems of justice, one for the rich and powerful and one for everyone else.” She denounced President Donald Trump for his attacks on the news media, saying he “tweets whatever he wants in the morning but doesn’t respect the amendment that allows him to do it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.