U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, sounding out middle-of-the-road themes that could carry her toward a 2012 reelection bid, told a "Face the Nation" audience on CBS Sunday that Democrats and Republican must convince voters they are working together.
Looking at this fall's midterm elections, the Minnesota Democrat said voters showed "they want a laser focus on the economy and jobs, they want to see some reduction in spending and bringing the deficit down, and they want to see us working together. So any party or person who decides to spend the next two years just tearing things apart and trying not to move America forward, I think they do it at their own peril."
Pointing to some of the bipartisan work of the current lame-duck session – a tax cut compromise, repealing the ban on gays in the military, and talks on the START missile defense treaty with the Russians – Klobuchar said "I think there is hope for the future." Klobuchar said she also holds out hope for the adoption of at least some of the elements of President Obama's bipartisan debt commission, which has proposed flattening tax rates and eliminating loopholes. "I don't agree with everything in the report, but there are some very good ideas on tax reform and other things," she told host Bob Schieffer. One idea she mentioned (though it didn't survive a recent GOP filibuster) is raising taxes on people who make more than $1 million a year to the rates they paid during the Clinton years, "when we were amazingly prosperous." Klobuchar also expressed optimism on social security reform, saying "we have to have the will." An idea "worth looking at," she said, is a plan to change the income level at which the social security payroll tax is applied. Currently, no taxes are taken out above the first $106,000 in annual income. "You could put in an area where you don't get taxed up to, say, $250,000, and then put the tax back in," she said. Klobuchar, generally viewed by her colleagues in the Senate as a moderate, acknowledged that Democrats might have lost the jobs argument with Republicans. "We need a major focus on private sector jobs," she said. "I think that focus has been there, but the truth is, when you ask people in the last year, when Democrats would talk about jobs, whether it was fair or not, they thought it meant government jobs. We need to talk about private sector jobs." (Special note: The line of the show went to Klobuchar sparring partner Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, who noted that Congress only has a 13 percent approval rating. "I'd like to know who that 13 percent is," Graham said, "and what it is they like.")
