April 9, 2007

More formidable, because less out-of-touch, than many of his colleagues:

It is fair to say that only George W. Bush did more than Schumer to help the Democrats retake the Senate last year. As chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Schumer recruited such ostentatiously centrist candidates as Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb, Jon Tester, and Bob Casey, and he raised enormous amounts of cash to fund their campaigns.

Liberal elitism, he said, as he stirred Sweet 'N Low into his tea with a chopstick, alienates middle-income families from the Party. "Middle-class people don't think everyone should have to drive a tiny little car to achieve improvement in global warming," he said. Invoking opponents of expanding the tuition tax credit to the middle class, he went on, "If we listened to the New York Times editorial board, we'd have twenty-one votes in the Senate."

-- profile by Jeffrey Goldberg, "Talk of the Town", The New Yorker, Mar. 19 (not online).