In a conversation yesterday with Chuck Schumer, Jason Horowitz got a little more insight into the book the senator plans to publish this January about the failure of both political parties to speak to voter concerns in the wireless internet age.
Technology, Schumer told Horowitz, had “changed everything,” and had “created the war on terror.”
The trick for Democrats to appeal to contemporary voters, he suggested, would be to govern without being beholden to interest groups. As an example, Schumer singled out the ACLU as the architect of the Democrats’ doom during the Ronald Reagan years:
Schumer, who is in the midst of an effort to make a dent in the GOP’s Senate majority, concluded that Reagan “had a point” at the time, but said that that rationale for voters after years of Republican rule was now “gone.”
In a bit a strategic restraint, Schumer left unspoken the formulation he’d used in an interview the Times last month, when he concluded, “What Bill Clinton did was modify Reagan Republicanism and put a Democratic face on it. That’s not going to work.”
— Josh Benson
