(CN) – Throughout the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar has taken to Twitter, feeding two birds with each tweet.
While fulfilling her role as an elected representative of the Gopher State, she also highlights her own qualifications for president as one of the now 17 candidates vying for the Democratic nomination.
After all, it’s not like candidates get to stop campaigning while the U.S. House of Representatives examines allegations that the sitting president hinged Ukrainian military aid on the investigation of a political rival.
“It’s the challenge of governing versus the challenge of campaigning and it has to be done simultaneously,” said Dr. Meena Bose, director of Hofstra University’s Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency.
As the first witness in the public hearings testified on Nov. 14, Klobuchar tweeted: “Our nation’s Constitution most deliberately included patriotism checks on corruption. This is how it works. In America, the president is not king."
If the impeachment continues into a trial before the U.S. Senate, six Democratic presidential candidates, including progressive front-runners Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, will be pulled off the campaign trail.
But C.J. Warnke, deputy national press secretary for Amy for America, isn’t worried. Instead, Warnke recalled one of Klobuchar’s many quips: “I have the most endorsements of anyone from elected officials in the presidential race, so I have a lot of nice surrogates." Klobuchar was speaking of Iowa, where the surrogates could campaign for her if the impeachment proceedings end up in the Senate and she's needed in Washington.
Helping Biden
Although the impeachment inquiry rained from a cloudy phone call in which Trump appeared to ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Biden is weathering the storm with a good raincoat.
"I learned something about these impeachment trials,” Biden said during the Nov. 20 debate in Atlanta. “I learned Donald Trump doesn't want me to be the nominee. I learned Vladimir Putin doesn't want me to be president."
Biden leads the Democratic candidates in the polls with 32% of national support and 29% of support in early primary states, according to Morning Consult's weekly ranking of voters. In the fallout of another White House scandal, Biden’s campaign is counting on voters being drawn toward someone they see as a levelheaded centrist.
“I think that it helps Joe and I think Joe does it right because his response doesn't go overboard,” said Tracy Haverstick, who runs a Joe Biden for President group on Facebook. “Joe is in an unusual circumstance because he is the target.”
Many analysts echo her sentiment.
“I used to think that every day they talked about this and Hunter Biden was a bad day for Joe Biden,” said Larry Ceisler, a public affairs executive and former Democratic political consultant. “Now every day they talk about it that's a good day for Joe Biden because they're saying we're afraid of Joe.”
Firing up the bases
Trump, a former reality TV star, has always been comfortable with the adage that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” On the first day of the public impeachment hearings, his re-election campaign raised over $3 million.