Dumb? Democrats nominating one of the most disliked politicians in America as their presidential candidate, perhaps the only opponent Donald Trump could have beaten. Dumber? The Senate Democratic caucus cluelessly anointing “I’d walk a mile for a camera” Charles Schumer as its public voice.
Chuck Schumer, the senator from Wall Street. Chuck Schumer, who joins Trump and the right wing leadership of Israel and its American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in opposing President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
What. Were. Senate. Democrats. Thinking?
{mosads}Where were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, avowed enemies of the Wall Street billionaires, who apparently thought they were atoning for their absence-without-leave by joining Schumer in playing identity politics, by endorsing left-liberal, African American, Catholic-converted-to-Muslim U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison for chairman of the Democratic National Committee?
In what used to be called the greatest deliberative body in the world, were Democrats doing any serious reflection at all on the results of the recent election? Was the exclusive club of forty-eight men and women just hell-bent on ignoring the toxic crony capitalism that Sanders excoriated during his race for the 2016 nomination against Hillary Clinton?
Goldman Sachs didn’t get its favorite $300,000-per-hour speaker returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to re-live the glory days of the Roaring Nineties when the company’s former Chairman Bob Rubin was Treasury Secretary under Bill and Hillary Clinton’s co-presidency.
But the biggest of the big banksters (rhymes with gangsters) now gets consolation prizes, with Senate Democrats selecting as their leader a politician who has accepted $576,490 in campaign checks from Goldman Sachs employees and political action committees, according to “OpenSecrets.org,” which lists the firm as the number one benefactor of Schumer from 1989-2016.
Given his Goldman Sachs golden political parachute, Schumer will probably feel right at home with former Goldman investment banker Stephen “Breitbart” Bannon, who will be chief strategist in Trump’s White House — a very, very white house, if alt-right Bannon has his way.
To quote myself, writing in May 2015 several weeks after retiring Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid heavy handedly moved to make Schumer his hand-picked successor:
Since arriving on Capitol Hill in 1975 as a young press aide, I’ve been watching the center of Democratic Party gravity shift from the farming and manufacturing Midwest, the progressive Boston-based northeast enclaves, and the independent-minded, populist Rocky Mountain and Pacific West Coast. The party of the little people has been drifting toward the money manipulating big people in the urban East, to those who risk other peoples’ savings in the seven blocks of Lower Manhattan known as Wall Street. The political tectonic plates have been shifting slowly. So gradually, few seem to be noticing the earthquake, shaking the Democratic Party from its historic embrace of working poor and lower middle class Americans.
That cleavage was evident in Clinton’s loss of the rust belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio on November 8th.
The embrace of crony capitalists by Democrats yielded the policy monster now known as ObamaCare, a sellout to big insurance and even bigger Big Pharma. Rammed down the throats of Republicans in 2009 by Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, that Obama legacy legislation is about to be tossed into the dustbin of history.
One of the few bright spots in Barack Obama’s crumbling legacy is the agreement to halt Iran’s threat of developing nuclear weapons. But the senator from AIPAC, as well as Wall Street, finds himself an ally of the president-elect, who has said Obama’s deal was a bad deal, and may try to repeal it.
Once again, as a primal scream: What. Were. Senate. Democrats. Thinking?! Why wasn’t there a challenge to Chuck?
A former Democratic National Committee press secretary from 1983 to 1987, Terry Michael describes himself as a “libertarian Democrat,” who says he “liked Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, but then supported a real anti-war and anti-crony capitalist, Libertarian Gary Johnson.” Contact: terrymichael@terrymichael.net