Sen. Chuck Schumer says it was a mistake for his Democratic Party to focus so intently on healthcare reforms during the early years of the Obama administration, blaming the strategy for election losses and fueling the Tea Party.
“Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them,” the New York lawmaker said during a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington. “We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem — healthcare reform.”
Schumer said that while the plight of uninsured Americans and the “hardships caused by unfair insurance company practices” needed to be addressed, “it wasn’t the change we were hired to make.”
“Americans [instead] were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs — not changes in healthcare,” he said.
Instead, Schumer said his party should have focused more on middle-income-oriented programs built on the “partial success” of the president’s $787 billion economic stimulus package that Congress passed weeks after Obama took office in 2009.
The president’s Affordable Care Act, which Congress narrowly passed in March 2010, was aimed at helping the 36 million Americans at the time without health insurance. But Schumer said the strategy backfired during the midterm elections later that year because only about a third of the people whom the law was intended to help were registered to vote, with only 40 percent of those going to the polls.
That’s “talking about 5 percent of the electorate,” he said. “To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense.
“When Democrats focused on healthcare, the average middle-class person thought: ‘Democrats are not paying enough attention to me.’”
Schumer said he raised his concerns with party colleagues in 2009 and 2010. But he said the consensus at the time among Democrats — who then controlled both chambers of Congress as well as the White House — was that they had a narrow time frame in which to act on passing a comprehensive healthcare law.
“Lots of people thought this [was] the one opportunity to do it. It’s very important to do,” he said. “And we should have done it. We just shouldn’t have done it first.”
Schumer said Democrats would have been better off — both politically and from a policy standpoint — if they first had focused on passing “bold” programs aimed at a broader swath of the middle class.
The misstep, he said, fueled the then-nascent Tea Party, giving the conservative movement an easy target to accuse Democrats of ignoring middle-class issues.
“The Tea Party said: See, government doesn’t work and cannot work for you,” he said.
Schumer also said both the Obama administration and congressional Democrats largely ignored the messaging of healthcare because “we were so busy with its passage and implementation.” This allowed, he said, Republicans and the Tea Party to fill a political “vacuum” created by Democrats’ inability to connect with average Americans.
The senator said the Tea Party eventually overreached its hand bashing Obamacare, helping Obama to win and Democrats retain control of the Senate in 2012.
But he said the Democrats’ historic losses during the 2014 midterm elections were largely the result of Democrats’ failure to push back at the the GOP anti-government message.
“Democrats lost in 2014 because the government made mistakes that eroded the electorate’s confidence in its ability to improve the lives of the middle class,” he said.
Schumer said that for Democrats to be successful in the 2016 elections, the party must “embrace government — not run away from it.”
“Democrats believe that an active and forceful government can and must be a positive force in people’s lives,” he said. “The belief in government — its size, its role, its possibilities — is really what undergirds our politics and fundamentally divides our parties.”
