Chuck Schumer Is a Terrible Democratic Leader With Terrible Judgement on Candidates
When it comes to Senate candidates, the Democratic leader rarely picks well – and both the party and the country suffer.
Remember former Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona? Given how she spent most of her single term in the Senate blocking one priority after another of her own party’s policy agenda (along with Joe Manchin of West Virginia), and then left the party and washed out of politics, it may come as a surprise that she was personally recruited to run for Senate by none other than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Indeed, Sinema is the rare politician whose behavior in office was so obnoxious that it has somewhat dented her post-office lobbying career. While she is being paid a lot by Hogan Lovells, a top-shelf lobbying firm, Arizona groups report that local Democrats hate her guts so much that if they catch a whiff of her pushing something, they automatically take the opposite side. A data center project she was pushing in Chandler, for instance, went down in a unanimous city council vote last December. It turns out it is possible to sell out to vested interests so much that it backfires on your future selling-out plans.
It’s not like Sinema was the only type of person who could possibly win in Arizona. While no Democrat but Manchin could have won in West Virginia in 2018, Arizona currently has two Democratic senators, as well as a Dem governor and attorney general. And while they are not progressive stalwarts on everything, unlike Sinema, they are certainly not voting against almost everything the party proposes.
Sinema’s performance in the Senate is reflective of the terrible judgement with respect to candidate recruitment shown by Schumer and the rest of Democratic establishment. They tend to pick candidates that are far more conservative than necessary, and rate supporting Israel out of all proportion.