Schumer, who as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is charged with leading his party's effort to retake control of the Senate in November, was in a reflective mood. He said he was looking past that critical challenge to the longer-term prospects of the party, and he didn't sound optimistic.
As important as it was to regain a majority in the Senate to put the brakes on President Bush in his final two White House years, Schumer said, the greater test for Democrats was to connect with average voters in a time of his party's disconnect with them.
At a breakfast with political reporters, the free-wheeling New Yorker said the Democrats have relied too long on the Franklin D. Roosevelt formula of patching together "a conglomeration of groups" with special concerns as the route to electoral dominance.
"We stopped being Democrats talking to small people on the issues" as Reagan so effectively did, he argued. Then he launched into a monologue on his party's failure -- and the Republicans' success -- in communicating to average voters about the day-to-day matters that concern them most.
Schumer cited the effectiveness of Bush and his colleagues in selling themselves as the stronger guardians of national security, while reducing the Democrats' posture to cut-and-run against terrorism in Iraq. On other issues as well, he said, the opposition has done a much superior job in phrasing its message for the man and woman on the street.
"We don't have 80 words" to sum up the Democratic agenda, he lamented. "We don't have eight." It's a common refrain among Democrats these days as they start rolling out the pitch they hope will enable their party to achieve that majority in both Senate and House in the fall, and go on to elect a Democratic president in 2008.
Schumer says his party must keep the focus on Bush's present vulnerability in the approaching congressional elections, but in the long run Democrats need to do a much better job articulating what they stand for in Main Street terms.
In so saying, he argues that just as the New Deal approach of stitching together disparate constituencies no longer works, neither does the Reagan demonization of big government. The huge technological advances and mushrooming of the global market have convinced average Americans, he says, that they face "big forces they can't deal with" on their own, and thus require governmental intervention.
Yet at the same time, Schumer contends that these average Americans remain motivated in a self-interest that the Democratic Party often has overlooked in its traditional objective of trying to improve the lot of all the various groups to which it has appealed in the past.
In the process of writing a book on his theory, Schumer says he has concocted an imaginary average man and wife who are mostly content with their lot but are disturbed by high crime and other neighborhood problems, and don't see themselves as part of a particular group.
He suggests they don't buy into the old class-warfare concept, which fueled the growth of the party in FDR days. His imaginary couple, Schumer says, are glad people can get rich -- so long as they don't get hurt in the process. But they don't like to be preached at either, he seems to be saying, observing at one point that "the hard left has a moral eliteness that is obnoxious."
It's a comment that some of Schumer's sharpest critics on the right might aim at the brash New Yorker himself. But it reflects an awareness on his part that his party has to get off its soapbox and start talking to the Joe and Joan Sixpacks more in terms of their needs and fears, as the Republicans have more effectively, if sometimes simplistically, done since Reagan arrived on the scene.
- - -
Jules Witcover's memoir, "The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch," has just been published by Johns Hopkins University Press. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.
