CHUCK SCHUMER’S CRITQUE DOES NOT GO FAR ENOUGH Last week, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told an unvarnished truth. According to Bloomberg, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate said, “Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in electing Obama and a Democratic Congress in 2008 amid a recession. “We took their mandate and put all our focus on the wrong problem -- health care reform.” “The plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships created by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed,” the Senator said. “But it wasn’t the change we were hired to make” in 2008. And voters have kept on firing Democrats left and right ever since. In the post-Obamacare enactment era, an era marked by the highest real unemployment levels since the Great Depression, Democrats have shrunk from 28 governors down to 17, a net loss of 9. They have dropped from 59 Senators to 44, a net loss of 15. They have skidded from 257 seats in the House of Representatives to 188, a net loss of 69 seats. And, according to Wikipedia, the 2014 elections “also left the Democrats in control of the smallest amount of state legislatures since 1861.” Chuck Schumer’s critique has drawn fire from a Democratic Party’s leadership – elected, appointed and self-anointed – that consistently and blithely ignored the plight of the unemployed and underemployed for the last seven years. It was and remains a leadership that turned their backs on the Democratic Party’s tradition of standing up for ordinary working folks. That tradition, a tradition begun with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, continued with Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and extended by Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society and William Jefferson Clinton’s efforts to meeting America’s Challenges, must be revived and revitalized. If the current Democratic leadership cannot or will not do so, then they will have lost more than eight dozen elected officials. They will have lost their raison d’etre. And a new generation of Democratic leaders should be called upon to replace them. Rick Sloan UCubed
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 22:21:20 +0000
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