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WASHINGTON -- Amy Klobuchar slept in a friend's basement Sunday night. She spent Monday evening at the White House.
It was a microcosm of Klobuchar's journey from Hennepin County prosecutor to U.S. senator-elect. By her count, the Minneapolis Democrat fought off seven opponents. Then she won what was supposed to be a close race by a 20-point landslide. Now, in the biggest surprise of all, she finds herself part of a new Senate majority.
That's meant a heroine's welcome from veteran Democrats suddenly about to take charge, such as California Sen. Barbara Boxer, incoming chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. "You're on my committee, and I'm thrilled," Boxer exclaimed when she ran into Klobuchar at a bank of Capitol elevators. "I'm delighted."
Klobuchar, 46, says she defeated Republican Rep. Mark Kennedy by reaching out to rural voters, highlighting economic issues and talking about cleaning up Washington in a state that prides itself on good government. By the end of her campaign, she was so far ahead that national Democrats put their money where it was needed more.
"Some of my supporters said 'oh no,'" Klobuchar recalled the other day as she rushed to a local TV news interview and a "power coffee" for female senators. "I said, 'This is the right thing. If it helps to take the majority so we can get more things done, it's worth it.' And I'd met the candidates. I knew the money would be well spent."
The orientation week, which ends today with a bipartisan breakfast, has been a reunion for Klobuchar and her fellow Democrats. They were thrown together at joint fundraisers all year, to the point of becoming perhaps overly familiar with each other's stump speeches.
More than once, Klobuchar recalled, Ohio Sen.-elect Sherrod Brown told her "if I have to hear that Zamboni line one more time, I'll walk out the door." That was the line where she contrasted Kennedy's parade of GOP celebrities with her own leading lights -- the Gear Daddies band of Austin, Minn., famous for a song called I Want to Drive the Zamboni.
Klobuchar's mentors have included some of her state's legendary progressives. She first came to Washington as an intern to Walter Mondale when he was vice president in the Carter administration. Her job was to do an inventory of vice presidential furniture. "I would crawl underneath and get the serial numbers," she said.
Much later, she picked up political tips from Paul Wellstone, the late senator. "He taught me how to campaign on a bus," she reminisced as she caught the Senate subway to a meeting. "Get on, go 10 blocks, get off, wave, and get on going the other way."
This week, after Democrats voted for their new leaders, Klobuchar lingered in the old Senate chamber gleaning wisdom from "the dean of the women's senators," she said, Maryland's Barbara Mikulski. She collected business cards and resumes from people recommending others for jobs in her new offices.
She found her way to her transition office, a space in the basement of a Senate office building. There, she and other senators-in-training performed tasks such as signing their names five times, then choosing their favorite signature for official mail and documents.
Her only mistake so far, Klobuchar told a local TV station, was thinking salad dressing was soup. "I never ate it," she said. "Someone stopped me in time."
Eight of the Senate's nine new Democrats attended orientation (Missouri's Claire McCaskill was on vacation), as did its one new Republican, Tennessee's Bob Corker. Corker won the open seat being left by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.
Frist, a heart surgeon in civilian life, hosted a dinner Monday night and Klobuchar says he was "very nice." They found common ground discussing her two mid-campaign hip replacements. The first didn't work and had to be redone a week before an important debate at Farmfest -- a 25-year-old farm show that attracts 40,000 people. Skipping it was not an option. "I took Advil," she said.
The pace of the campaign has hardly slowed. There are staff positions to fill, a thick volume on parliamentary procedure to read.
Klobuchar does have some non-senatorial duties, among them the 27 items on her 11-year-old daughter's to-do-after-the-election list. They include buying a new dress, visiting Disneyland and replenishing the pet supply. "We'll probably buy a hamster," Klobuchar said. "The old one died of old age during the election."
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