Jewish Tribalism in Action: Charles Schumer poised to become Senate Majority Leader

Charles Schumer, a Jewish Senator from New York, is poised to become the Senate Majority Leader if, as currently expected, Harry Reid of Nevada is voted out of office, but Democrats retain an overall majority in the Senate. How he got there is, like the Elena Kagan nomination to the Supreme Court, a prime example of Jewish networking. An article in the Washington Post, written by an admirer and fellow Jew, is quite revealing in its celebration of both Schumer’s stereotypically Jewish behavior and listing his myriad connections which helped him rise to the top, most of whom are Jewish. Horowitz opens by praising Schumer’s stereotypically Jewish behavior as ‘effective’, but admitting that average white Americans find it repugnant:

During his three-decade legislative career, Schumer, 59, has developed a reputation as a razor-elbowed, shamelessly self-serving, media-addicted political monster. He is also arguably the single most effective lawmaker of his generation.

There is a sense within the White House that Durbin would be easier to work with, that Schumer would pose a problem on issues that could get him press back home, and that his Brooklyn bearing doesn’t exactly play between the coasts.

From an early age, Schumer’s Jewish networking is evident:

He worked for Stanley Kaplan, the testing guru, and aced his SATs.

“A strong education was enormously important,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who, like Schumer, former Minnesota senator Norm Coleman and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, graduated from James Madison High School in Brooklyn.

Stanley Kaplan, Bernie Sanders, Norm Coleman, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are all Jewish. The U.S. Senate, which by population proportion should only contain one or two Jews, has three Jewish Senators from the same school in Brooklyn (and 14 total, including the soon to be departed Arlen Specter).

Lanky with bushy sideburns, Schumer joined the assembly’s basketball team, where he played guard alongside Sheldon Silver, now the powerful speaker of the assembly.

“We both come from a non-jumping background,” Silver said.

Schumer made more of an impact on the chamber floor, and on Fridays accompanied another rising star, Jerrold Nadler, now a veteran congressman, for the long drive back to the city from Albany.

Both Silver and Nadler are Jewish, as Silver jokingly refers to. Horowitz describes Schumer’s power base, the Jewish financiers and heavily Jewish national media in New York City:

Schumer’s political power in Washington has always rested on the local pillars of voracious fundraising and manic courtship of the media, a cornerstone of which is the Sunday news conference. The idea is that exposure demonstrates hard work to voters and shows colleagues that collaboration will be rewarded with coverage in the New York-based national media.

“It may seem he has a pathological need for attention,” said one of more than a dozen former aides interviewed for this article. “But there is a method to the madness. He thinks it’s key to his survival.”

Schumer also helps out other Jews in their rise to power:

“He’s a half-a-loaf guy,” said Anthony Weiner, a former aide who now represents Schumer’s old congressional district. “He understands that’s the art of legislating.”

David Yassky, a former aide who is now New York’s taxi and limousine commissioner, recalled how in 1992 Schumer navigated the House’s committees and applied media pressure to outfox powerful Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and pass a measure requiring identification numbers on automobile parts.

Weiner and Yassky are Jewish of course.

The story continues:

The campaign introduced a new Schumer breed of operative — press-savvy political wunderkinds like Josh Isay and Howard Wolfson — who have since guided local, state and national candidates into office. From Schumer they all learned a common goal: to annihilate the competition.

Isay and Wolfson are also both Jewish.

More stereotypically Jewish behavior, praised by the Jewish author as ‘effective’:

He also glommed onto colleagues’ legislation or news conferences, a tacky scheme so common it became a verb, as when a colleague “got Schumered.”

What he lacked in decorum, he made up for in persistence.

Schumer always carried a narrow white card in his jacket’s breast pocket: On one side was a call list covered with dozens of names and on the other, colleagues he needed to nab.

“He’d buttonhole the senators,” recalled one former staffer, who added that Schumer, upon making an agreement, would rush to the cloakroom, relay the news to his staff and instruct them to coordinate a news release with his counterpart’s aides, “before they could unwind it,” inking any deal at the moment of agreement.

More:

As a junior member on the Judiciary Committee, he took the unusual step of lobbying Justice Department staffers to get someone on their payroll to work for him.

The person he got on the payroll as an ‘unusual step’ is not named, but I’m sure most of us would bet a fair sum of money on the ‘religious background’ of the staffer.

More praise for Schumer’s stereotypically Jewish behavior:

Throughout the race, Schumer flirted with the notion of running for governor. With reelection secured, he met with Reid, who wanted Schumer to head up the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. According to former staffers, Schumer used the threat of leaving to angle for something more.

“It was brilliant,” one of them recalled. “He never even wanted to be governor.”

In exchange for staying on as chairman of the DSCC for the ’08 cycle, Schumer received a previously nonexistent position in the leadership, under Reid and Durbin. As an unequivocal big shot, he started imparting the “Schumer method” to top candidates, which boiled down to: create a blizzard of press, answer every attack within 24 hours, take strategic orders from Schumer and raise a whole lot of money.

Schumer has now adopted a nationally palatable opposition to Wall Street, but in the years before the economic collapse, he padded his coffers — now an astonishing $21.8 million — with donations from the financial industry.

According to one attendee at a fundraiser for the DSCC during the 2006 cycle, Schumer and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, another Brooklyn son who found success, entertained guests by performing nostalgic duets of furniture store jingles. “Chuck is the only political person I know who enjoys that part of the job,” said Silver.

Blankfein, like many other bigwigs in the financial industry, is Jewish.

Although liberal on most issues, Schumer is a ‘far right’ neoconservative when it comes to Israel. In an interview with a Jewish radio show recently, Schumer described his response Hillary Clinton’s mild criticism of Israeli President Netanyahu:

So I called up Rahm Emanuel and I called up the White House and I said, “If you don’t retract that statement you are going to hear me publicly blast you on this.”
Of course they did retract it. Now what’s happened, and many of us are pushing back, some of the Jewish members will be meeting with the President next week or the week after, and we are saying that this has to stop. You have to have, in terms of the negotiations,
you have to show Israel that it’s not going to be forced to do things it doesn’t want to do and can’t do. At the same time you have to show the Palestinians that they are not going to get their way by just sitting back and not giving in, and not recognizing
that there is a state of Israel. And right now there is a battle going on inside the administration, one side agrees with us, one side doesn’t, and we’re pushing hard to make sure the right side wins and if not we’ll have to take it to the next step.

The ‘battle within the administration’ is likely between gentile liberals, who tend to sympathize with Palestinians, and Jews, who make up a large part of the administration and the upper echelons of the Democratic establishment in general. Schumer continues, discussing both the large number of Jews on the Supreme Court (this interview came before Kagan’s nomination was announced) and his support for Israel:

Luckily in terms of Jewish people we have good representation in terms of the Supreme Court. That will continue. One thing I want to assure your listeners, Nachum [the host], my name as you know comes from a Hebrew word. It comes from the word shomer, which mean guardian. My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov and I believe Hashem, actually, gave me name as one of my roles that is very important in the United States Senate to be a shomer to be a shomer for Israel and I will continue to be that with every bone in my body for of the other is against me.

Steve Clemons, the liberal author of ‘The Washington Note’, makes this observation:

Schumer’s screed gets to the edge of sounding as if he is more a Senator working in the Knesset than working in the United States Senate.

This is the 2nd time I know of that Schumer has publicly crossed the line when it came to zealously blaming his own government and colleagues in delicate matters of US-Israel-Palestine policy.

During the third of three major efforts of the George W. Bush administration to get the recess appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton confirmed in the US Senate, Senator Schumer launched a passionate personal campaign to help Bolton succeed.

Schumer called many Democratic Senate colleagues and bluntly said, “A vote against John Bolton is a vote against Israel.”

The ‘liberal’ Schumer was also a supporter of the Iraq War, as well as Bush appointees Michael Mukasy as Attorney General, and Michael Chertoff as Secretary of Homeland Security, both of whom are Jewish.

Schumer’s rise to the top is both an example of Jewish networking and power.  If Schumer becomes Senate Majority Leader, the leadership of the Democratic Party will be a black activist from Chicago (Obama), a stereotypical New York City Jew (Schumer), and a San Francisco feminist (Pelosi).  This will make it even harder for the Democratic leadership to relate to average Americans.  In the past, they were conscious of this, nominating Southerners in their successful runs for the White House since 1964, and appointing Congressional leaders from the ‘heartland’ such as Harry Reid of Nevada, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and Dick Gephardt of Missouri.