The Two Faces of Chuck Schumer: Schumer’s Message to the Democratic Left: I’m With You, Until You Start Losing.Dan Henninger
http://online.wsj.com/articles/dan-henninger-the-two-faces-of-chuck-schumer-1417653342?mod=hp_opinion
Let us count the times Sen. Chuck Schumer has blown himself up politically.
That was a short count, wasn’t it?
Whatever else might be said of him, Chuck Schumer is not in the habit of self-immolation. But progressives have been lining up to vilify New York’s senior senator as the Democratic Party’s village idiot for saying before Thanksgiving that ObamaCare was a political mistake. He even said that focusing on health care, the party’s magic mountain, was “the wrong problem.”
David Axelrod accused Sen. Schumer of being, ugh, a professional politician, whose “abiding principle” is how to win elections. That’s an understatement.
In 1974, Chuck Schumer stepped out of Harvard Law School and into the New York state legislature, never practicing a day of law. In 1998, the 24th year of his chosen career, Mr. Schumer entered the U.S. Senate.
Sen. Schumer’s chosen career is the bloodless business of political protection. In order, that includes a) him, b) his base of power and c) his party. Common to all three is winning, not losing, elections.
Does anyone seriously believe that before he gave that ObamaCare speech, Chuck Schumer had not already talked about the election with a lot of Democrats in the Senate and around the country?
And what does one imagine these professional Democrats were telling each other? Here’s a guess: They now realize that Barack Obama and the politics he represents—the politics of the progressive left—is undermining their party’s electoral future at every level of government.
Because Sen. Schumer supported ObamaCare and defended other Obama policies, his critics say he’s a hypocrite. Oh my. Maybe these people didn’t understand the terms of the prenuptial agreement at this level of politics: Chuck Schumer was on board for whatever ride, program or gimmick the Democratic left wanted, so long as members of the party family kept winning re-election. Now they are not.
What Chuck Schumer said is probably less than half of what was on his mind. How about “climate change?” Not the great and honorable cause called climate change but the political strategy for gaining power.
Had Barack Obama found some pretext to approve the Keystone XL pipeline before the election, Democratic candidates would have had a case to make to the blue-collar voters who have just deserted the party.
Instead, climate change just got Louisiana’s Sen. Mary Landrieu thrown under the bus by the White House. Instead, as Mr. Schumer surely noticed, Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, has denounced the party. The union has 500,000 members.
Sen. Schumer knows exactly when the Democratic Party shifted from an organization able to cover many political bases to one willing to protect just its progressive base. It was 2006, when the left drove Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut out of the party with a primary defeat (he won anyway as an independent). Remember the giddy progressive dance after they engineered Sen. Lieberman’s primary defeat?
Chuck Schumer, who was running the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee then, might have accepted this as the cost of doing business with the party’s ascendant progressive coalition. It’s harder to accept when they start looking like losers.
With that speech, Chuck Schumer was sending an audible signal to state and local party bosses around the country and to peeved donors—aghast at the midterm results—that not everyone in Washington has lost his mind to the party’s Occupy-and-windmill wing.
Some think the senator’s pitch for a “middle-class” agenda was a stalking horse for Hillary Clinton ’s campaign. You know, the famous Hillary shot-and-a-beer in an Indiana bar in 2008.
Maybe what the middle class wants is more than a drinking buddy.
Republican Larry Hogan just became Maryland’s governor after overcoming a 15-point deficit with an antitax campaign. The Baltimore Sun recently cataloged state Democrats adjusting to what we might call the Hogan Effect.
Baltimore’s Democratic mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in her first term enacted a bottle tax, a taxi tax and a billboard tax. After the November election, she appointed a task force to find cuts in taxes and fees. She says she will veto a proposed tax on plastic bags, calling it a “backhanded tax” that’s unfair to businesses. As to the election results, she says, “I listened.”
Democratic state senator James Brochin : “I have consistently given the message in meetings that there is no reason why we need to be the party that raises taxes. I’m hoping they get it now.”
Maryland’s infamous fees on “polluted” rainwater runoff look to be a goner.
What are the odds that any Democrat of national prominence, including Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, would now adopt lower taxes as party policy? It’s less than zero, so long as the left’s grip on party policy holds. Call that the Elizabeth Warren Effect.
By default, the Republicans own what looks like one of the most populist, middle-class issues out there—get the government’s hands out of my family’s pockets.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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