Democrats in Trumplandia
NEWSWEEK
19 DEC 2016 AT 08:58 ET
Packed into a cramped Senate hearing room, the crowd erupted into prolonged whistles and cheers. Bernie Sanders had just joined a “Hands Off Medicare” rally-cum-press conference on December 7, and the activists in attendance, mostly union members in matching T-shirts, were enthralled. When the headliners of the event, Democratic Party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, took the podium, however, there was nothing more than polite applause.
This didn’t seem to faze Schumer, who had the unenviable task of following one of his colleague’s stem-winders on inequality and the greed of the “billionaire class.” After embracing Sanders on his way to the podium, Schumer opened his remarks by thanking “my friend and colleague and fellow James Madison High School of Brooklyn, New York, graduate.” Schumer is nine years younger, so the two didn’t overlap in school, but he likes to play up their shared Brooklyn roots. “Bernie was on the track team, and they won the city championship,” Schumer reminisced, his own Brooklyn accent more tempered than Sanders, despite the fact that the latter relocated to Vermont decades ago. “I was on the basketball team; we weren’t that good. Our motto was ‘We may be small, but we’re slow.’”
Schumer likes to trot out that high school sports anecdote whenever he and Sanders appear together in public. He does it so often that some on his staff know it by heart. And the rest of us may as well, given how regularly they now tag-team press conferences in Washington. As Democrats come to grips with their demoralizing 2016 election losses, one thing is already becoming clear: This loudmouth, Brooklyn-born duo are two of the leading forces shaping the party’s identity in the era of Donald Trump.
Progressive firebrands such as Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren are the closest things Democrats have to a public face right now. They command huge followings on social media, can rake in cash from small-dollar donors and relish slamming the president-elect the way the party’s base craves. Sanders also has a new political organization, Our Revolution, run by former aides, to maintain his following among progressives. But make no mistake: Neither he nor Warren is in charge. It is Schumer whom fellow Democrats expect to steer the party through the Trumpian wilderness.
-snip-
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/democrats-in-trumplandia/