Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Almanac Of American Politics: Schumer Profile · National Journal: 2006 Vote Ratings For Schumer · National Journal: The Middle-Class Blues · National Journal: Beware of Flying Elbows [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web Senator Schumer's Web site · "FOX News Sunday" Interview With Schumer (5/20/07)

By Brian Friel, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, June 1, 2007

Freshman Sen. Amy Klobuchar is doing the best impression of New York's commanding senior senator, Brooklyn-born-and-raised Charles Schumer, that the kindly Minnesotan with Midwestern diction can muster. She's recounting an episode from early in her 2006 Senate race in which Schumer, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, put his index finger in her face and told her unequivocally, "You're going to raise one million in the first quarter." Klobuchar recently re-enacted the scene by whisper-screaming the "one million," scrunching up her face, and flicking her index finger straight up, an inch from a reporter's nose.

Klobuchar indeed raised $1 million in three months, as Schumer had instructed. At a subsequent campaign event, she demonstrated the aggressive New Yorker's index-finger move. " 'I don't know what I'm going to do with this guy,' " Klobuchar recalls telling her audience. " 'I can't take him to Minnesota. We're too nice. I don't know what I'm going to do with him.' " Not missing a beat, Schumer yelled out from the back of the crowd, " 'You're lucky! It's 'cuz I like you. With the other candidates, I use the other finger.' "

The in-your-face tactics that Schumer used with Klobuchar and other Democratic candidates went a long way in helping his party in the 2006 election cycle. Fueled by the astounding $120 million he raised at the DSCC -- a record, and $33 million more than his GOP counterpart collected -- he masterminded the Democrats' stunning Senate takeover, surprising most political experts. And in the process, Schumer also helped himself.

A decade ago, Schumer was a House member who, though active, ambitious, and known for his quick quips and talent for attracting media attention, was not on the leadership track. Today, he has parlayed his pivotal role in his party's 2006 election victory to carve out a unique -- and ubiquitous -- role in the Senate Democratic leadership.

The week after the November election, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., created a leadership position just for Schumer -- vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Conference. That made him the No. 3 on the team, behind Reid and Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and ahead of Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the conference secretary. "Senator Schumer has many talents, one of which is helping to set the direction of the caucus," Reid said at the time. "I'll use him as a utility man. He'll be called upon to do lots of different things."

Schumer agreed to stay on as DSCC chairman for the 2008 election cycle. He is also chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, a post he is using to push a "middle-class agenda" for his party. And on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he is chairman of the Administrative Oversight Subcommittee and the point man in the high-profile effort to oust Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. "He has a tremendous amount of energy," Murray told National Journal.

Not only does Schumer hold a string of titles these days, he wields considerable power too. His media skills are well known, of course, and he has shone as the savviest and most-vocal spokesman among his less-glib leadership colleagues who have occasionally put their feet in their mouths. But beyond the sound bites, Schumer is also a trusted personal consigliere to Reid. He is frequently seen dispensing strategic political advice into the leader's ear. And he offers a ceaseless campaign mind-set to a party leadership hungry to rack up victories against Republicans and to ultimately build on its 51-49 Senate majority.

"Chuck's involved in all of our leadership decisions at every meeting," Durbin said. "He views them not only from a policy viewpoint, but also the impact on the next election."

In a recent interview with NJ, Schumer, 56, said that Reid is "like a brother" to him. Indeed, the relationship is close enough that Reid regularly ribs Schumer in public. When a reporter asked Reid on May 23 about one of Schumer's more arcane energy policy proposals, the majority leader demurred. "Senator Schumer got a perfect score on his LSATs," Reid said. "So I'm going to have to defer to him on that."

The two men have different backgrounds and political strengths: Schumer is a fast-talking Harvard-educated Jew from Brooklyn who relishes the rough-and-tumble and seems naturally at ease when the cameras are rolling. Reid is a low-key Mormon from Searchlight, Nev., whose public statements can be awkward, but he has won his Democratic colleagues' loyalty and unity by working hard to tend to their interests and by paying his dues in defending the party on the Senate floor.

According to Schumer, the 2006 campaign helped to forge the pair's close working relationship and their friendship. They talk, on average, five times a day. "We just are batting around what we should do," Schumer said. "One thing we share in common is, we both want to win."

Even some of Schumer's GOP adversaries give him credit for knowing how to win. "Unfortunately," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the Senate Republican Conference vice chairman, "he's smart and he's got the instinct for the jugular."

Rise to the Top
Schumer was one of three children in a middle-class family; his father ran an exterminating business. The senator often reminisces about playing basketball and stickball as a child. Despite his Brooklyn upbringing, he's a lifelong Yankees fan who idolized Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.

"When he was a boy living in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn in the late 1950s and early '60s, he and his friends would take the D Train to Yankee Stadium," New York Times columnist Ira Berkow wrote (subscription) in 2003. "Young Chuck loved the Yankees. The Dodgers and the Giants had absconded to Los Angeles and to San Francisco, the Mets were barely a gleam in Bill Shea's eye, and the Yankees were the only team in town."

Schumer's persistence -- a trait evident in his party leadership efforts -- was honed during his first summer job. At the age of 14, he said, he ran a mimeograph machine all day in a 3-foot-by-3-foot room while his friends played basketball and tried to pick up girls at the beach. He graduated first in his class from James Madison High School and was a teenage champion on the TV quiz show It's Academic. Schumer went on to Harvard, where he worked on Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign. Immediately after earning his law degree from Harvard in 1974, he ran for the state Assembly at the age of 23 and won. In 1980, just before he turned 30, he was elected to the U.S. House.

By 1987, when NJ profiled 13 rising congressional stars -- lawmakers whom peers, aides, and lobbyists identified as people to watch in the future -- Schumer made the list. He was already a media go-to guy, always eager to supply a good quote on the issue of the day. His legislative work in the House focused on the Banking Committee, where he helped shape a response to the savings-and-loan scandal in the late '80s, and the Judiciary Committee, where he sponsored major crime legislation in the early '90s.

Meanwhile, Schumer also worked the back rooms and befriended other rising stars. He bunked at the infamous Capitol Hill "Animal House" owned by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., now chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and a member of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's inner circle. Former Rep. Leon Panetta, D-Calif., who went on to become President Clinton's White House chief of staff, was a roommate. Schumer still lives there with Miller, Durbin, and Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass.

While in the House, Schumer attended dinners with powerful Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., who held court on Tuesday evenings and mentored up-and-comers on the ways of Washington. Schumer had a similar mentor in New York, Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink, a fellow Brooklynite. Never shy, Schumer once told the gruff Rostenkowski that he, like Fink, was probably "a marshmallow underneath." Today, several freshman senators call Schumer their mentor.

He was elected to the Senate in 1998 after amassing a huge campaign war chest, thanks in part to his committee ties to the financial industry. In the Democratic primary, he dispatched former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro and New York City public advocate Mark Green. Then Schumer faced Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato in the general election.

D'Amato was known as "Senator Pothole" for his devotion to meeting constituent needs, but Schumer chipped away at his popularity, arguing that the three-term senator had repeatedly lied and was out of touch with New Yorkers. Schumer had been in Congress for 18 years -- as long as D'Amato -- but he campaigned on the theme that the senator had been here too long and that Washington had changed him. And Schumer harped on D'Amato's mistakes, unnerving the incumbent. Schumer won, 55 percent to 44 percent.

The new senator set about matching D'Amato's vigor for constituent services. He vowed to visit all 62 New York counties every year, a pledge he has met eight years running. He has also kept his name in local newspapers by holding Sunday press conferences that focused on issues affecting middle-class families, reasoning that Sunday is a slow news day and reporters are looking for something to cover.

According to the Almanac of American Politics, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., was one of the first to say that the most dangerous place in Washington was between Schumer and a TV camera. Today, Schumer holds more press conferences than any other senator, and colleagues joke about his outspoken personality. "He's so low-key," Durbin said, laughing to NJ, one of senators' many standard lines about Schumer. "He's shy, reserved, and doesn't speak up enough to make his point known," deadpanned Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., head of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

During his 2004 re-election bid, Schumer scared off serious competitors with his fundraising prowess and rising popularity, and he went on to win every county but one. Soon after, Reid tapped him to head the DSCC for the 2006 cycle. In addition to raising a record amount of money, he recruited or backed moderate Democratic candidates such as Klobuchar in Minnesota, Jim Webb in Virginia, and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, even when some of their views didn't square with national party dogma. Casey, for example, opposes abortion.

Schumer also helped to craft the Democratic Party's overall message for the 2006 campaign, which he describes in eight words: "No war in Iraq. No corruption. Bad economy." Democrats avoided such divisive issues as gun control and abortion, instead offering a modest positive agenda that included a minimum-wage hike, college aid increases, and funding for stem-cell research. Schumer actively encouraged Senate candidates to talk about issues that would resonate with the middle class. Webb, for example, was mostly known as an anti-war candidate, but his campaign also emphasized Virginians' economic struggles. Schumer and many of the freshmen contend that the middle-class focus, not just the war in Iraq, was key to their November wins.

Picking issues and packaging them well are two skills that Schumer has added to the Democrats' leadership team. And, as Schumer regularly notes, he has never lost an election, a streak that now includes his chairmanship of the DSCC.

The Constant Campaigner
On the afternoon of May 23, senators were convening for a vote on an amendment to the immigration bill. Schumer walked onto the Senate floor carrying a blue folder with a piece of paper in it, headed up to Reid and Murray, and talked for a few minutes.

He then began to circulate among the Democratic senators, pointing to the paper, which described a no-confidence resolution against Gonzales that Schumer said he would introduce the next day. He was looking for co-sponsors, moving with ease from senator to senator and marking them down one by one. Durbin said yes, as did Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. "Sure," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said. Schumer worked the crowd for another few minutes -- his resolution offered the next day had 26 co-sponsors -- and then went back to Reid. The two sat down and confabulated for 10 minutes. It's a common scene on the floor: Schumer making the rounds with colleagues on various issues and then holding tete-a-tetes with Reid.

Schumer has taken a campaign-like approach to his Senate leadership posts. His push to oust the attorney general is reminiscent of his 1998 campaign against D'Amato -- a persistent, tenacious effort to chip away, even against formidable opposition.

Along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Schumer first demanded an investigation into the U.S. attorney firings back in January. He was the first Democrat to call for Gonzales to resign, on March 11. His Senate colleagues have been falling in line behind him ever since. As the Judiciary Committee has held hearing after hearing on the issue, he has appeared in the Senate studio at least once a week to review why Gonzales should go.

In addition to the 26 Democrats who signed on to Schumer's no-confidence resolution on May 24, nearly a dozen Republican senators have questioned whether Gonzales should remain in the Bush administration. "Former FEMA Director Mike Brown used to be the symbol of the administration's lack of competence and credibility," Schumer said at a May 24 press briefing. "But now, unfortunately, there's a new one. I know the president thinks Attorney General Gonzales is doing a heck of a job, but nobody else seems to agree."

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, has criticized Schumer throughout the scandal, even as he, too, has questioned Gonzales's leadership. Specter and other Republicans have called on Schumer to step away from the investigation because of his political role as DSCC chairman, especially after the scandal embroiled Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who is up for re-election next year. The Senate Select Ethics Committee is looking into the propriety of phone calls that Domenici made complaining about the performance of David Iglesias, the fired U.S. attorney for New Mexico.

"We just take him one step at a time," Specter said of Schumer, when asked by NJ. "If I agree with him, it's a matter of coincidence."

Similarly, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who has told Gonzales that he should resign, said that Schumer's push for a no-confidence vote on the attorney general -- now scheduled for mid-June -- is political grandstanding and a waste of time. "His job right now is to run the Democratic campaign committee," Coburn told NJ. "That's where this is coming from. That's what's wrong with this country today. People are more interested in power than in the future of the country." But when asked, Coburn also spoke positively of Schumer. "It is all politics on this no-confidence deal, but I don't think he's all politics," Coburn said. "I like Chuck."

Ignoring the criticism, Schumer has been unrelenting. Indeed, his campaign against Gonzales runs parallel to the other campaign he is helping to manage for the Democratic leadership: the anti-war campaign. Throughout the year, Reid has steadily pulled Democrats together to support a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq. Senate Democrats have held floor vote after floor vote on President Bush's war strategies, with an eye toward either adding enough Republicans to their side to force change, or at least making Republicans amass a record of unpopular votes that they will have to defend on the 2008 campaign trail. In the Senate, 21 GOP seats are up next year, compared with only 12 Democratic seats.

Schumer avidly scours polling data, and he regularly points to surveys showing that a majority of Americans are frustrated with Bush's war policy. He uses that data in describing Bush as out of touch -- again echoing his campaign against D'Amato. "The president's in his bunker on both the war in Iraq and Attorney General Gonzales," Schumer told reporters on April 24. "What everyone else sees clearly, he doesn't see at all, and that's a real problem for our country." Schumer regularly claims that Bush is as isolated as President Nixon was toward the end of his presidency.

Schumer and other Democrats contend that Republicans are moving in their direction on Iraq, but the anti-war campaign has had some setbacks. In a late-April speech, Reid said, "The war is lost," a comment that Republicans pounced on as "defeatism." Vice President Cheney on April 24 spoke to reporters after the Senate Republicans' Tuesday policy luncheon to denounce Reid's comments. (Durbin had a similar problem in 2005, when he compared American interrogators at Guantanamo to Nazis, a comment for which he later repeatedly apologized.)

To smooth over Reid's war comments, Schumer followed a campaign strategy called the 24-hour rule: Let no criticism go unanswered for 24 hours. He and other Democrats insisted that Reid meant that the war is lost if Bush continues to follow his current strategies in Iraq. And when Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote a piece calling Reid "the Democrats' Alberto Gonzales" for making the comments, and a "continuing embarrassment," Schumer, in under an hour, gathered the signatures of all the other members of the Senate Democratic caucus for a letter to the editor that ran the next day.

"In contrast to Mr. Broder's insinuations," the letter said, "we believe Mr. Reid is an extraordinary leader who has effectively guided the new Democratic majority through these first few months with skill and aplomb."

Democrats, of course, recently had to acquiesce in sending the White House a war supplemental spending bill with only a list of benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet and some reporting requirements -- not the troop withdrawal timelines that many Democrats had wanted. With the money for the troops set to run out in a few weeks, Schumer said, and the president threatening more vetoes that the Democrats lacked the votes to override, they decided they had to relent.

"When it's Democrats against Bush, we win," Schumer told NJ in the interview. "When it's Democrats against the military, we lose. We have to say to some of our [anti-war] friends, 'We have to be strong and persistent on this, but we have to be smart.' " He noted that Senate Democrats have acknowledged all year that changing the war strategy wouldn't happen overnight. "We said it in February -- this is going to take a long time, because we need Republican votes," he said. "We're going to keep at it, and at it, and at it."

Beyond Bush
Colleagues say it is not surprising that Schumer tackles his duties in the Democratic leadership as if he were running an election campaign. "His political skills -- exhibited in strategizing and supporting a campaign -- work well inside here, in pushing a progressive legislative agenda," Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told NJ.

But Schumer emphasized in the interview that he is not single-mindedly focused on his campaigns against the president and the GOP. "The thrust is keeping our eye not just on George Bush, and not just on Republicans, and not just on the press, but on the average voter," he said. "My focus is, we have to do things on the meat-and-potatoes issues that affect people," Schumer said, pointing to Democratic efforts to increase the minimum wage and make college more affordable.

In January, the senator published his first book, Positively American, which is part autobiography and part Democratic strategy document. He connects the two by describing his middle-class upbringing and suggesting that Democrats must focus on such voters to establish a lasting majority. The book's subtitle is Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time.

In the book, Schumer reviews poll data showing how Republicans won a majority of middle-class white voters in most recent elections -- even narrowly winning that constituency nationally while losing control of Congress in 2006. He credits the GOP's success to the party's clear message that stresses the core beliefs of smaller government, strong defense, and traditional values. But he contends that the Republican message is losing its resonance with voters, providing an opportunity for Democrats to recapture the middle class.

"2008 will be a referendum on how well we deliver for middle-class families," Schumer said at a February 15 press conference. Six of the newly elected Democrats joined Schumer at the event, at which they promoted a package of middle-class tax breaks.

Schumer and the freshmen have been methodically exploring such issues, largely through the Joint Economic Committee, on which three of them (Casey, Klobuchar, and Webb) serve. The committee has held hearings on middle-class prosperity, income fluctuation, elder care, and the effects of oil-industry consolidation on gasoline prices. "He saw firsthand, more than a lot of the other senators, the issues that mattered to the people in our states," Klobuchar said. "He saw how important that middle-class issue was, and how people feel like they're losing ground."

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., described Schumer as the freshmen's mentor. "He wanted us to hit the ground running," Cardin said, noting that the Senate's six-year terms could dampen a lawmaker's sense of political urgency. "He's taught us that every day is precious."

Many of his fellow lawmakers cited Schumer's boundless energy as key to his successful juggling of so many roles in the Senate leadership. When he is in Washington, Schumer said, he works from 8 a.m. until midnight. "I don't need a lot of sleep."

Across a variety of fronts, Schumer asserted, Democrats feel that they are winning, that the wind is at their backs. "Overall, we're pleased at the direction we're going," he said.

Republicans, for their part, contend that Democrats remain divided over Iraq, that they have little to show for their legislative efforts, and that their oversight efforts on Gonzales and other issues amount to little more than political theater. They recognize, however, that Schumer is an adversary to be reckoned with. "I have to give him credit for doing a good job on behalf of his caucus," Cornyn said. "I just wish it wasn't as good as it is."

The final grades will come in November 2008. For now, many Senate Democrats seem pleased to have a utility man like Schumer on their roster. But they could have been hitting without him if Schumer had gotten his wish back at P.S. 197, when he completed a fourth-grade project on what he wanted to be when he grew up. "I got a D," Schumer recalled, "because I wanted to be Mickey Mantle."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Need A Reprint Of This Article?
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350.