If you thought the Democratic tsunami was a popular backlash against the disastrous Iran war and the gas prices that followed — which even Trump isn’t bothering to dispute — you’ve got it all wrong.
Washington has figured out what really happened: Chuck Schumer. The midterm wipeout, the mainstream media insists, is a veritable Tschunami.
Never mind that the 75-year-old is the least popular Senate minority leader in decades, after a dismal response to Trump’s second term that consisted largely of strongly worded letters. Suddenly he is Sun Tschumer, the reincarnation of the ancient Chinese military strategist, returned after 2,500 years to save the Republic with his political cunning.
But how did Schumer go from the frail party elder who personifies the gerontocracy to Schuperman, ripping open his drab suit to reveal a Beltway sex symbol underneath? Turns out it was all an act. As Sun Tzu taught, all warfare is based on deception.
“When you are weak, appear strong; when you are strong, appear weak,” Sun Tzu said in The Art of War.
It’s an insight Schumer took to heart. Step one: appear weak — literally, physically weak. Schumer was hospitalized last year and routinely stumbles over his words in interviews. My personal favorite came on Morning Joe, when he confused the word “question” with his own name, announcing, “That’s a good Chuck,” before helpfully clarifying: “I’m the Chuck!”
He also came off as weak politically, with the lowest approval rating of any national leader the Gallup organization has surveyed, including a disapproval rating of 56 percent from his own party.
But this was all an act of subterfuge to lull his Republican adversaries into a false sense of security.
What looked like catastrophic blunders were, it turns out, moves in a diabolical ruse. He encouraged then-President Joe Biden’s doomed re-election campaign. In a cycle defined by rage at the gerontocracy, he handpicked 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills to run for Senate. (In fairness, he also picked the young Haley Stevens.) And most recently, he declined to steer party money to campaigns he didn’t care for, like that of Angie Nixon in Florida, who lost by just three points.
Maneuvers. Feints. Covert operations. He is the Eisenhower of today’s political battlefield, the man who is going to make the country all better.
“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle,” as Sun Tzu also said. No one has ever subdued an enemy with less fighting than Chuck Schumer.
Yet the press spent two years writing Schumer’s political obituary. Now, having finally realized his grand design, it is rushing to atone. The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer summed up the old consensus — Schumer as “the last aging Boomer who wouldn’t let go” — before anointing him as the “architect of a historic landslide.”
Slate ran its piece under the headline “Where Do Democrats Go to Get Their Apology?” Explaining that Schumer and House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries had served as “pain sponges for furious liberals,” now all is absolved. None of this new generation crap, no youth vote, no Latino revolution, no people holding their noses to vote for Democrats to show their disapproval of Trump. Chuck Schumer knew it all along.
Sen. Ruben Gallego told Time magazine that anyone who can “bring home the bacon” deserves to stay on. And the bacon-bringer himself offered aphorisms worthy of the ancient master. On Election Day morning, he described his mood as “nauseously optimistic.” The morning after, he told the world that voters “reduced the red brick wall to a pile of bricks.”
Even the master of deception shows how smart he is by disagreeing with himself. Schumer told the Center for American Progress that millions voted Democratic “out of frustration with Trump and the GOP, not out of love for the Democratic Party.”
Now that the press has seen the light on Schumer’s strategic brilliance, only one blind spot remains: its regrettable failure to reckon with the man’s animal sexual charisma, which surely did at least as much to deliver the landslide as his political acumen.
Some news outlets have come tantalizingly close. Roll Call wrote that Schumer “flexed his political prowess.” Time marveled at the death grip he’s kept on the party’s Senate campaign machine for two decades. Punchbowl reports he’s now on a victory tour, like Mick Jagger. Even last year’s hospital visit came after he got lightheaded at the Senate gym. A physique like that doesn’t sculpt itself.
It all seemed to turn around for him and the party when he replaced those droopy half-lens glasses with a more modern pair of hip plastic frames, which quickly became as iconic as Mia Khalifa’s.
That and his avowal after Trump’s re-election that voters simply “didn’t realize how much” Democrats had done for them. Classic Sun Tzu: convince the enemy you’ve learned nothing.
Of course, not everyone has fallen under his spell. In a break that would be extraordinary in any normal year, five newly elected Democratic senators have announced they won’t back Schumer for majority leader.
Let’s call them what they are: haters. It’s not hard to see what happened here. You spend months campaigning, you pull off a historic upset, and you get to Washington only to find that every woman in the building is still staring at the guy with the new frames. It’s hard.
The experts called it a Democratic tsunami, and they’re half right. It’s really an earthquake, what happens when millions of American women catch a glimpse of Chuck Schumer at the same time. The earth moves.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Thanks. I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
If both Schumer and Jeffries are not voted out, the New Democrats will achieve almost nothing for at least the next two years. Especially on anything regarding Israel or combating corporate influence on our government and elections.
Abdul El-Sayed said it best:
Money out of politics.
Money in your pocket.
Medicare For All.