Schmers Family Values Remarks - Road to the Middle Class

EVERYONE on the right has got their knickers in a twist over Sen Check Schumer’s (D-NY) remarks on the Rachel Maddow show. She had him on to discuss the holdups to Obama nominees on Capitol Hill. Republican senators are forcing 60 vote majorities on all the nominees, or at least that’s what Rachel and Chuck would like you to think.

You can see where Chuck Schumer is coming from. He wants to move a couple of the moderate Republican senators off dead center. So he makes Point One: The Reagan Years Are Over.

The world has changed. The old Reagan philosophy which served them well politically from 1980 to about 2004 and 2006 is over. But the hard right which still believes when the federal government moves, chop off its hands, still believes that, you know, traditional values kind of arguments and strong foreign policy, all that is over.

Oh yeah? If only! If only more that 0.75 percent of the hard right believed in chopping off the hands of the Federal government! Now we get to Point Two: Come On You Guys, Get On the Bus, or how to bully a few Republican senators to vote for Obama nominees

But there are 10 or 12 what you‘d call mainstream conservatives, people like Dick Lugar who supports Chris Hill, for instance, people like Lamar Alexander or George Voinovich. And the question is are they going to continue to march totally in line with the hard right even though I think in their hearts they know it is wrong or break on occasional issues?

You see, President Obama is talking bipartisanship, according to Chuck, so sooner or later these chaps are going to have to move.

So what we have here is a pure tactical move by Chuck Schumer, an attempt to bully potentially wavering senators into line. So he just picked a couple of stale political talking points out of the air with which to make his point.

Chuck Schumer knows better. After all, he is the masterful political tactician who has been recruiting family-values candidates to run as Democrats in Republican-leaning congressional districts and getting pretty good results.

The crunch was always going to come when the Democrats were back in power. What would these conservative Democrats do once a liberal president backed by a liberal Congress? What would voters think once liberal policies started getting enacted on the Hill?

So let’s not listen to what Chuck Schumer says. Let’s watch what he does. If Chuck Schumer was busily recruiting family-values candidates in the mid 2000s and if Candidate Obama ran as a man who talked a lot about his faith and his values, well, they are telling us something.

They are telling us that Democrats are going to experience some heavy going in the years immediately ahead if they think that traditional-values politics is dead.

Pace the feminists, this family-values stuff is all about women. Men don’t really care about family values, not unless they are carefully taught. But it is women who care about family. They care about babies, they care about loved ones. They worry about their aging mothers. But women don’t get the space to do their caring unless there’s a pretty strong family structure in place.

Democrats succeeded in persuading a generation of women to abandon the hearth and home. Government could do just as well as mothers, they said. In fact, government with its helping professionals could do better. But the daughters of that generation are now in their young adulthood. They know the cost of women who leave the care of their families to the government.

Democrats ignore this fact at their peril.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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