Sen. Chuck Schumer: The Democrat’s pathfinder

By:  LeRoy Goldman

Ashville Citizen Times 12.27.2014

In 1980 Chuck Schumer was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Brooklyn’s 16th District. In 1998 he was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, and he is now the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate behind Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, and Dick Durbin, the assistant minority leader. From 2005 to 2009, Schumer headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which was responsible for electing 14 new Democrats to the Senate in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Schumer is an indefatigable worker — wily, ambitious, respected on both sides of the aisle — and has never lost an election.

And he’s brilliant. He was the valedictorian of Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, and he scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT exam. He graduated from Harvard College in 1971 and was an honors graduate of the Harvard Law School in 1974. He passed the bar exam the following year, but has never practiced law.

Schumer has been a strong ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton since the Clintons burst onto the national scene in the early 90s. On Nov. 2, 2013, Sen. Schumer spoke at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner where, three years before the 2016 presidential election, he announced his full-throated and unwavering support for Hillary Clinton for president.

Schumer said, “Run Hillary, run. If you run, you’ll win, and we’ll all win.” He also said we will, “create a generation of Democrats who will make sure the middle class gets what it needs.” Giving the Tea Party their due, Schumer underscored his party’s failure to constructively tap into the anger of the American people as the Tea Party had been able to do during the 2010 election when the GOP picked up 63 seats and took control of the House of Representatives as the electorate punished President Obama and the Democratic Party in response to the enactment of Obamacare.

And now no one should misunderstand the significance of Sen. Schumer’s remarks delivered at the National Press Club in Washington last month. Schumer’s remarks have exposed his party’s dirty laundry. They have ignited a bitter, intra-party debate.

Schumer had the temerity to do what politicians of both political parties abhor and fear — tell the truth. Referring to the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress in 2008 he said, “Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem — health care reform. It wasn’t the change we were hired to make; Americans were crying out for an end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs; not for changes in their health care.”

Schumer is savvy enough to see the carnage the 2014 election produced for the Democrats and how the 2016 election could make it infinitely worse. Thus, the bombshell that he dropped at the National Press Club is as much a coded message to Hillary Clinton as it is anything else.

Schumer remembers well that immediately following his election in 1992, President Clinton announced that his preeminent domestic priority would be health care reform, an effort that was spearheaded by Hillary Clinton. Schumer remembers that Hillary produced a bill so complex that no one could understand it. It died without a vote in a Congress controlled by the Democrats. Hillarycare was the blunder that gave rise to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, which gave the Republicans control of the House for the first time in 40 years.

Schumer remembers well that when Obamacare was in trouble in the Senate in 2009-10 the president dispatched Bill Clinton to the Hill to lobby for its passage. Schumer remembers well that it was the public revulsion to Obamacare and the way it was rammed through Congress that brought the Tea Party to power in the House in 2010. And Schumer now realizes that it was the radioactive, long lasting half-life of Obamacare that has neutered President Obama and given the GOP control of the Senate.

Schumer has put a warning shot across Hillary’s bow. He’s telling her to distance herself from health care reform. He’s insightful enough to know the Supreme Court may cripple Obamacare this term. He’s telling Hillary that the path to the White House is one that goes through the middle class.

Schumer would like to be majority leader of the Senate. He might even prefer to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court. His message to Hillary is not absent self-interest.

Goldman lives in Flat Rock. He was member of the federal government’s Senior Executive Service for many years. He can be reached at EmailMe.

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