MILFORD – Heavy on new ideas, Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota on Tuesday hosted a meet and greet event at the Coworking House, 52 Nashua St.

She prefaced her remarks by commenting on the earlier announcement that former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris of California was dropping out the 2020 race.

“She and I have gotten to be closer friends,” Klobuchar said of her fellow U.S. Senate member. “We were good friends to begin with. Sometimes, campaigns have a way of tearing people apart. For us, it brought us closer. She is an incredibly strong public servant.”

Klobuchar then turned her attention to the Coworking House and how a town such as Milford is so responsible for its results.

“This is a manufacturing town,” Klobuchar said. “We know that businesses close and new ones open. The whole idea here is to foster new ideas and new businesses.”

She parlayed that into the fact that there has been a “startup slump,” in the country, down 30% during the last decade.

“That’s one of the reasons that I started the Entrepreneurial Caucus,” Klobuchar said. “Which is a bipartisan effort with (Republican) Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, to start focusing on what we can do get more individuals and small businesses going. It’s always been the engine of our economy and certainly the engine of the economy in New Hampshire.”

Klobuchar touched upon the subject of President Donald Trump’s administration, saying, “We have a president in the White House right now who spends his life trying to shut people out, trying to shut out ideas, trying to use people as political pawns, whether they be immigrants or whether they be people of color, or people that he just doesn’t agree with.”

“I’m the opposite,” she said. “I like to bring people with us.”

Klobuchar said it’s not enough to win an election, but said candidates should in the process try to get people to be part of the enterprise again by changing the scope of American democracy.

“I think the first answer is making it easier for people to vote,” she said. “You’ve had some struggles like that this year in New Hampshire. If you look across the country, you have people literally being shut out from voting because of purging of voter rolls or because of hyphens in their names.”

Klobuchar added that she hopes to make it possible for young people to be automatically registered to vote once they turn 18 years of age.

“If everyone can get a Social Security number, we can find a way to do this,” she said. “If my hometown company of Target can find a pair of shoes with a SKU number in Hawaii, we should be able to register every kid to vote.”

Klobuchar also wants to get so-called “dark money,” out of politics.

“Which not only turns people off of our democracy,” she continued. “But, it also actually makes it harder to reach compromise and bring people together. Because every time that someone takes a baby step and it willing to do something on a bipartisan basis, they risk being hit by the super PAC or by money from the outside. This is fundamental to our democracy.”

Klobuchar said people need to get engaged with democracy again.

“It’s about making it easier to pay back student loans if you go into public service,” she said. “It’s about a rhetoric that says, we want you to join our government instead of going after public servants. I think Marie Yavanovitch, in her testimony before the house, captured it well with one angle of our public service, and that is the State Department.”

Specifically, “when she talked about how they have hollowed-out our State Department, by turning people off of public service, by turning them away, by making them want to leave.”

Klobuchar touted New Hampshire and its civic foundation: “From one of the first states to ratify the Constitution, to the first state to have its own Constitution, this has been a big part of the culture of this state.”

Klobuchar listed health care and nonprofit public options, bringing pharmaceutical prices down, mental health issues, opioid addiction, and long-term care for the aging population as major concerns.

“These are opportunities,” Klobuchar said. “But we’re not going to get to any of them if we don’t have a democracy that works and if we don’t have someone that heads up this ticket that can win big. When you look at some of the people in Kentucky and Louisiana, who just voted for Democratic governors, and if you note that President Trump went down there the night before, to those two states, to hold rallies, my questions is, where can we send him next?”

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