Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time - Hardcover

Schumer, Charles E.; Squadron, Daniel

 
9781594865725: Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1594865728 ISBN 13: 9781594865725
Verlag: Rodale Pr, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

New York's popular senior senator, who won reelection by the largest margin in the state's history, offers a bold plan for change in the Democratic party

As the results of the last presidential election played out, it became clear that while Democrats call themselves the party of the middle, the middle class does not consider the Democrats their party. Now, Chuck Schumer, who has gained national prominence as the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and as a member of the Finance Committee, offers his plan for capturing the middle-class vote and moving his party back into the majority. Democrats can accomplish this, the senator explains, without abandoning their traditional principles.

Schumer envisions a hypothetical, average middle-class American family—he thinks of them as "The Baileys"—who spend "as much time talking about the cost of cornflakes as the cost of the national debt." He then details specific proposals he believes would keep America safe, secure, and on top; and support the aspirations of a prosperous and growing middle class while speaking to anxieties created in a world changed by technology and globalization. For example, he proposes to:

• increase the number of college graduates by 50%

• reduce property taxes by 50%

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CHUCK SCHUMER was elected to the New York State Assembly at age 23—making him one of the youngest members since Theodore Roosevelt—and to Congress at age 29. In 1998 he became New York's junior senator, and he now holds the senior position. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife. They have two daughters.

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CHAPTER 1

VICTORY?

ELECTION DAY IS TORTURE. You've finished crafting the message, cutting the ads, knocking on doors and reading the polls. Everything that you can do is done. But everything that really matters is yet to happen.

It's all over, as they say, but the voting.

On election night 2006, I was in a suite on the eleventh floor of the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill with a small group of staff, friends and family. While we waited, I paced the room and picked at cold calamari and oversized cookies. Having nothing to do brings out the worst in me--I get antsy, irritable and hungry.

I was not on any ballot this year. But the election was as personally important to me as any I'd ever lived through. I was the senator in charge of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the political organization responsible for all the Democratic Senate races. Two years earlier, I had taken the job because I worried that if we lost three more Senate seats, beyond the forty-five that we held, there would be no check on the Bush administration's policies, which were doing so much damage to the country I love. For two years, I had been obsessed with preparing for this election. I had recruited candidates. I had raised money. I had approved senior staffs. And I had become friends with many of the Senate hopefuls whose fates were being decided on that night.

Now, waiting for the first returns--the polls had closed in Virginia and Ohio less than an hour earlier--I knew that Democrats were, amazingly enough, on the edge of actually taking back the Senate majority. To do it, we had to pick up six of eight vulnerable Republican seats and hold on to every Democratic seat, including six tough ones. Supposedly, during a card game on Air Force One a few weeks before election day, President Bush had said that for Democrats to take back the Senate, "Schumer would need to pull an inside straight."

I was still waiting to see the cards.

For the four hundredth time that day, I called J. B. Poersch, executive director of the DSCC, for an update on the exit polls--voter information gathered on behalf of the networks and craved by campaign staffs, which are ravenous for any morsel of data.

"How's it look?" I asked as he picked up before it even rang.

"Mostly good."

"How about the big four?" These were four close states--Missouri, Montana, Tennessee and Virginia--where we would need three wins.

"Missouri's okay. Montana's tighter." In Missouri, we had Claire McCaskill, the popular state treasurer who had almost won the governorship two years earlier. In Montana, Jon Tester, a lifelong farmer with a quarter-inch crew cut and a keg for a belly, was our candidate. Both were trying to unseat Republican incumbents.

"Tennessee?"

"Not so good."

"Virginia?"

"The first precincts are reporting."

"And?"

"I don't know."

Suddenly, every BlackBerry in the room was buzzing.

"Chuck!" three aides yelled at once. "They're calling Ohio for Brown!"

Phil Singer, the DSCC's communications director--and the best in the business--came running into the room. "They're calling Ohio--"

"I know."

A staffer handed me a cell phone. "Sherrod Brown," she mouthed.

"Call you back, J.B." I said, pulling one phone from my right ear and putting another to my left. "Sherrod! You ran a great race! See you in the Senate." Sherrod Brown had beaten incumbent Mike DeWine by running an energetic populist campaign in Ohio--a state that, two years after making the difference for Bush, had turned bluer than a clear sky.

One down. Five to go.

Again, the room erupted in BlackBerry buzz.

"Chuck," everyone yelled, "they're calling . . . " Voices were lost in a jumble.

"Pennsylvania for Casey!" screamed half the room.

"And New Jersey for Menendez!" screamed the other half.

Bob Casey, pro-life and pro-gun, had unified the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and trounced the ultra-conservative Senator Rick Santorum. Bob Menendez, who had been appointed to his seat by New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine less than a year earlier, had overcome a barrage of nasty attacks to notch a solid win. They represented one pickup, in Pennsylvania, and one save, in New Jersey.

A minute later, two cell phones were thrust at me. "Bob!" I cheered. "Congratulations!"

Two down, four to go.

On the other side of the hotel room, an aide was monitoring Virginia's official returns on the Web between writing lines for that night's speech. I leaned over his shoulder. "How's Virginia?"

"Webb's down eight thousand. But less than half of precincts are in."

I looked at my watch--a little past eight. It was going to be a long night. The last time I had lived through an election night this long was during my first campaign, for the New York State Assembly, when I was twenty-three years old.

In 1974, I graduated from Harvard Law School. After the ceremony, as my parents drove me back to Brooklyn, I broke the news to them: I wasn't going to accept the job as an associate at the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison for $400 a week--which, to us at least, seemed an enormous sum. Instead, I was going to run for the Assembly, right in the district where I grew up.

The Forty-Fifth Assembly District covered a row of middle-class neighborhoods extending from the Atlantic Ocean straight up into southern Brooklyn--Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, Midwood and Kings Highway, where I was raised. My parents didn't want me to run. They had struggled to send me to college and hoped more than anything that I would earn a "comfortable living." My mother kept telling me to give up the silly dream of being a politician and accept my fate as a corporate lawyer--something secure and respectable.

I would have none of it. My mind was set on elective office. After seven years at Harvard, I wanted to come home to Brooklyn and go into public service. There was no point in arguing; I was sure I wanted to serve my neighborhood as an elected official. I may only have been twenty-three years old, but the seeds that led to my decision had been planted many years earlier.

In 1964, when I was fourteen, I had to get a summer job. I ran a mimeograph machine for a Madison High School teacher who had come up with a new idea for a small business: He would prepare students for the SATs. The teacher's name was Stanley Kaplan and the company was Kaplan, Inc. Less than twenty years after I graduated from Madison, he became a multimillionaire when he sold his business to the Washington Post Company. God bless America!

By nine each morning during that summer, I would be at Kaplan's place, in a windowless three-foot-by-three-foot room that reeked of ink and ozone, running the mimeo machines. Around 9:05, I'd be going gangbusters; at 9:10, I'd check my watch. I'd check again at 9:15, 9:20, 9:30--by a quarter of ten I'd be sure it was four in the afternoon.

By ten, I'd be out of my mind with boredom, thinking of all my friends at the beach, playing basketball and trying to pick up girls. I didn't know how I would survive until the end of the day, much less for the whole summer. All day, every day, from ten o'clock until the end of work, I swore to myself that I would never choose a career where I'd be bored.

After Madison, I got into Harvard (in part because of those endless hours spent staring at SAT prep material spinning around the mimeo drum). In those days very few people from places like Madison went to Harvard. Sixty percent of the freshman class were from private schools, most of the rest were from wealthy suburban school districts. I was scared--how would I fit in? The one Madison guy who had gone to Harvard ahead of me suggested that I try out for the freshman...

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Verlag
Rodale Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1594865728
ISBN 13 
9781594865725
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
274
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