Party time: Schumer, the Senate Democrats' message man, says the president finally has their back
Charles Schumer at a Sunday press conference. Azi Paybarah, via flickr
7:51 am Oct. 7, 2011
Senator Charles Schumer thinks Barack Obama has turned a corner.
“Here's what I think happened: The president's basic view for the first six, eight months of this year was 'let's all come and reason together,'” Schumer said with a slight laugh, in an interview at his midtown office on Sunday morning.
“And what he has seen is something that many of us felt from the beginning, and that was this hard-right group in the House, which controls the House, and controls the Republicans in the Senate so they can block anything there, do not want to come reason together.”
For Schumer, who is officially charged with crafting the Democratic message coming out of the Senate, the combination of a more combative president and an unyielding Republican caucus is cause for newfound optimism. His hope is that he can now do what he does best, finding points of partisan disagreement and leveraging them to the Democrats’ advantage, without worrying that the president will undercut his talking points in vain pursuit of bipartisan compromise.
There is, in fact, some evidence that the White House is starting to see things Schumer’s way.
On Wednesday morning, Schumer joined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin on Capitol Hill to announce they would bring the president’s jobs bill to the Senate floor next week, but with a different method of funding than the hodge-podge of loophole closures and revenue-raisers that the White House had originally proposed.
"We think we have found the best way to pay for it," said Schumer, speaking of his own idea—first floated back in December—to tax Americans making more than $1 million a year, rather than the $250,000 threshold the president had proposed.
"We've consulted with the White House on this, and they're fine with the idea," said Schumer.
Sure enough, on Thursday morning, Obama told reporters he was “comfortable” with the Senate plan.
Schumer sees this as a clear chance.
“I think in August, the president sort of took stock,” he said in the interview in his office. “He is laying out the difference between us and them clearly and finding places where there is disagreement.”
August is, of course, when Republicans held up what would normally have been a routine vote to raise the country's debt-ceiling—essentially to allow the federal government to spend money already approved for spending by Congress—thereby pushing the country to the brink of an unprecedented default on its debts.
It was a frustrating moment for Congressional Democrats, many of whom saw the manufactured crisis, at least in the zero-sum terms of Washington, as a significant political opportunity. As it became clear Republicans would push the issue to the eleventh hour, Schumer prevailed upon the president to warn seniors and veterans that they might lose their benefit checks, according to one person familiar with the conversation. The congressional switchboard was overloaded with calls, at the president’s urging, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell floated the possibility that Republicans might relax their opposition and let Democrats raise the debt ceiling themselves.
It was getting close to becoming a national disaster, pushing America to default and doing damage to its credit rating. It would have been a catastrophic failure of government. And it was going to be, very publicly, the Republicans' fault.
Then the president blinked, abandoning his hopes for a "grand bargain" and settling instead for the creation of a so-called supercommittee charged with making another round of deep spending cuts, as demanded by the G.O.P.
The crisis was averted, and the Republicans had won.
“I'm not going to comment on the president, but I'll tell you what I felt,” Schumer said of those negotiations. “When Mitch McConnell, two weeks before the default, said, ‘I'll let you guys pass raising the debt ceiling, you'll have to do it, we'll figure out a parliamentary way to do it,’ he was basically suing for peace. And we didn't follow through on that.”
Congressional Democrats saw Obama's tactical retreat as part of a pattern.
In December 2010, Obama struck a deal with Boehner to extend all of the Bush tax cuts, over the objections of Senate Democrats who had rallied around Schumer's call to tax those making more than $1 million.
And this April, Democrats had largely succeeded in casting Republican threats to shut down the government as a petty battle against Planned Parenthood, before the president struck an eleventh-hour deal that included some of the cuts.
“The president bailed them out,” said one Democratic congressional aide who doesn't work for Schumer. “That’s an argument the president should have relished. But the messaging there, the Democrats totally had them by the balls.”
So when Republicans began rattling the saber of another potential shutdown last month, calling for cuts to offset any disaster relief funding, most Capitol observers had a hunch as to how it might play out.
At his ritual Sunday press conference in New York on September 25, one tabloid reporter was piping in questions from her Washington bureau.
"My bureau has one more question," she said, as Schumer was trying to wrap things up.
"Your bureau," Schumer said, with an impatient smile. "Go ahead, yeah, yeah."
"Why do you keep getting outflanked by the G.O.P.?" she asked.
"Well, I don't think we are," he said. "The bottom line is that on this bill, we're saying, we want to do it our way. And I believe that the public is much more on our side than on the other side. And if we stand firm on our positions then we'll win." (With that, he was off. "Ready to roll?" he asked an aide. "How's the car? Alright? Does it need transmission fluid?")
Schumer made the same "stand firm" pitch to his Senate colleagues, and, with a little help from some unexpected FEMA funds, they came to a compromise with House Republicans that avoided any offsets, without the specter of a federal shutdown.
In the interview with Capital this week, Schumer was ready to declare victory.
“What I think the Republican leadership realizes is this brinksmanship is hurting them,” he told me. “First, the Tea Party now is much less popular than it was six months ago. At the beginning, everyone said, ‘Hey, they're a force to cut waste in government, no one else is doing it.’ And they've had their effect, as the American system says they should. They had a big success in the election, and deficit-reduction has become much more a part of the agenda because of them. OK, so they get that. But when they do brinksmanship and when they become ideological and say 'it's only my way or the highway,' they lose. And the American people are seeing that.”
(Last month, in a New York Times/CBS poll, about 29 percent of people said they had unfavorable view of the Tea Party, compared to 21 in favor. That was a dimmer view than the 18 percent who viewed it unfavorably in April of last year, but an improvement over the 40 percent who viewed it unfavorably in the days after the debt ceiling debate.)
Tapping his hand on his conference room table, Schumer said there had actually four appropriations bills in the last two weeks.
“On three of them, they didn't even do what they usually do and say”—he raised his voice in mock consternation—"'Unless you cut some more, we're not letting them go through and we're willing to shut down the FAA, the highway building.' On the fourth, they began a confrontation and for the first time, they had to back off, rather than we back off.”
Schumer called it “a real signal.”
(Last month, in a New York Times/CBS poll, about 29 percent of people said they had unfavorable view of the Tea Party, compared to 21 in favor. That was a dimmer view than the 18 percent who viewed it unfavorably in April of last year, but an improvement over the 40 percent who viewed it unfavorably in the days after the debt ceiling debate.)
Tapping his hand on his conference room table, Schumer said there had actually four appropriations bills in the last two weeks.
“On three of them, they didn't even do what they usually do and say”—he raised his voice in mock consternation—"'Unless you cut some more, we're not letting them go through and we're willing to shut down the FAA, the highway building.' On the fourth, they began a confrontation and for the first time, they had to back off, rather than we back off.”
Schumer called it “a real signal.”
“It was my view that we should make a stand and say we are not going to do offsets,” Schumer said, banging lightly on his table. “Because then we'll never fund disaster relief. California will be burning and we'll be debating whether we should take it out of education or health care. And I made an argument to the caucus that we should stand and fight and come back the week we were off, and say we're not giving in. We did. And we won. So on all four, we basically won.”
To win the larger message war, Schumer has taken to vilifying the bloc of mostly freshman, firebrand Republicans in the House, in the hopes of saddling them with the country's ongoing economic woes.
"They are ideologues, they are narrow, they are for slashing any kind of government funding and they don't care what damage they do, whether it's shutting down the government, defaulting on our debt, downgrading our debt," he said. "That's why we've started to call it the Tea Party Downgrade, the Tea Party Economy, the Tea Party Recession."
But Schumer avoids lumping Boehner into that group, preferring to cast the House Speaker and the rest of G.O.P. as reasonable but ineffectual hostages to their extremism.
“I think Boehner, if left to his own devices, would be a mainstream Republican—conservative but willing to negotiate, and not ideological in saying it's my way or no way,” Schumer said, sounding almost as if he meant it. “But these hundred Tea Party people force him to be far more extreme. And here's one of the problems: The mainstream Republicans on the other side who are more moderate don't say much. So if you're a senator, a mainstream Republican senator, conservative but not part of this hard-right group, the only people you hear from are the hard right. So you're pushed in that direction.”
Schumer has, essentially, the opposite problem. His fellow senators seem mostly inclined to follow his lead, but the success of his messaging depends on a White House that is less partisan and therefore effectively less liberal than he is.
When I asked Representative Jerrold Nadler, a liberal, earlier in the week about the effectiveness of the congressional Democrats in selling their agenda, he said, “It’s hard to answer that question because when you’ve got a president of your own party, he’s got the bully pulpit.”
And, he said, “It’s almost impossible to carry a different message from the president."
For the moment, though, Democrats in the Capitol and the White House seem to be in concert.
At the press conference in Washington with Reid and Durbin, Schumer noted the difference in the president's tone, and said the aggressive speech calling on Congress to pass the American Jobs Act was one of Obama’s “finest moments.”
"Rather than settling for a proposal that represented the lowest-common-denominator-style solution, the president went big and he went bold," said Schumer. "The Republicans have been on their heels ever since. The president is out there as recently as yesterday constantly drilling this. And the polling data shows it. By double digits, Americans have more faith in the president and Democrats to create jobs than Republicans."
A Washington Post poll released this week showed voters trust Obama more than congressional Republican to create jobs, by a 15-point margin, 49 to 34. But on the question of their overall handling of the economy, respondents were evenly split: Obama held just a one-point advantage in the Post poll, 43 to 42, and was down two points, 43 to 41, in a Quinnipiac poll released on Thursday.
But the strategy is in its early stages.
“Voters blame both parties but they’re blaming Republicans more, because they’re sensing that there’s a more proactive agenda coming from the president,” said pollster John Zogby.
“The benefit they have is the other side,” Zogby said. “The Democrats really have this opportunity right now to look like statesmen.”
Schumer plans to push that perceived advantage immediately, with what he hopes will be reinforcement from the president.
He says he will advance a series of proposals on jobs and the economy—at least one a month, beginning with the current bill on Chinese currency manipulation—each time drawing very definite lines in the sand and daring Republicans to cross them. After that, there might be another jobs bill focusing on infrastructure, followed by others that have yet to be finalized.
“I think the public instinctively believes that we are focused more on jobs and more on the middle class than the Republicans," he said. "And we've got to focus like a laser on it. I think people are going to see that we're really trying, and we're not ideologues.”
