Amy Klobuchar holds a United States Senate record. She’s raised $17,000 in campaign funds from ex-boyfriends alone.

Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, also guesses that she’s the only senator to have started her working career at an A&W Root Beer stand, where she was required to wear a tight T-shirt that read “Take home a jug of fun.”

Her interest in politics didn’t come until she was done with her education and working for a law firm. When she was young, she was doing the same things all the other girls in 1970s suburban Minneapolis were doing: straightening their hair, tanning on their roofs or trying to marry their high school prom date. But hers ended up gay, and maybe that’s how she ended up in the Senate, she said in Syracuse on Monday.

Klobuchar joined Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner in a moderated discussion on women in politics on Monday morning in Eggers Hall’s Strasser Legacy Room. More than 30 Syracuse University community members attended the event.

“I always figure women oftentimes can’t just achieve things by being macho — like, you know, walking around on a flight deck saying, ‘Mission accomplished’ in a flight suit — that’s not going to work,” Klobuchar said. “And I’ve noticed that women tend to run more on accountability, they run more on statistics, they run on results.”

Klobuchar, who is one of 20 women currently serving in the Senate, recalled the lack of female role models she had when she first ran for a Senate seat in 2006. She remembered looking at the websites of prominent female politicians and noticing their efforts toward getting results and publishing those results.

She added that when she was running for Senate, she would constantly be asked: Can a woman win?

Her response, which she said made no sense but seemed to work, was that half the electorate was men. And if she was just running as a woman she wouldn’t win. So she was running on her record as a prosecutor. As someone who served as a county attorney for eight years.

One of the most recent experiences Klobuchar had with sexism on the job was when she was on a conference call with her colleague, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), some House representatives and a high-ranking military official. The official addressed the congressmen by their official titles, but insisted on calling Klobuchar “ma’am.”

“I said, I really don’t care if you call me ma’am but can you call Al ‘sir’ then so we’re the same?” she said. “We just want to be the same. And I said we both do the same job.”

Even after Klobuchar said something to the official, he called her “ma’am” again by the end of the phone call. In a move the senator said she probably wouldn’t have made five years ago, Klobuchar approached the official’s boss at an event a week later and asked him to make sure the official didn’t differentiate between men and women in equal positions.

“You don’t have to make a public deal out of everything, but calling people on it just quietly when it happens is one way to deal with it because it’s not right that it’s continuing in this day and age,” she said.

Miner also reflected on times she’s been slighted in her political career, especially as mayor of Syracuse. She recalled when she was first elected mayor in 2010, when men she had never met came into her office, calling her “Stephy” and asking her for tax breaks.

“That’s weird. And it took me a while to sort of put my finger on it that it was a kind of power dynamic that they were trying to use,” Miner said. “And the longer I have been mayor, the faster I’m able to pick up these kind of things that happen.

“You’re in this weird role where all of a sudden your name is a weapon.”

Published on April 18, 2016 at 10:24 pm

Contact Alexa: atorrens@syr.edu