OPINION:
Barack Obama has been punched by Republicans so many times over the course of his failed presidency that it is no longer big news.
However, now his performance in office is being attacked by major Democrats, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer, the party’s No. 3 leader in the Senate — a significant and far-reaching political development that isn’t getting the big headline treatment it deserves.
Since the November elections, the national news media seems to be focused much more on the agenda debates among Republicans than the family feud between the White House and Democrats over who is responsible for their party’s sweeping losses in Congress.
It turns out there is more infighting among Democrats and the White House over a host of issues than there is in the Republican ranks. Mr. Schumer lifted the lid on the behind-the-scenes, postelection bickering and discord that now divides his party.
Late last month, speaking at a major venue in the nation’s capital, the senator from New York said Democrats made a big mistake by enacting Mr. Obama’s sweeping health care law in 2010 at a time when the economy was mired in a recession and the highest priority was unemployment.
“Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in electing Mr. Obama and putting Democrats firmly in charge of Congress in 2008, Mr. Schumer told a packed audience at the National Press Club.
“We took their mandate and put all our focus on the wrong problems — health care reform,” he said.
“The plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships created by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed. But it wasn’t the change we were hired to make” in the 2008 elections, he said.
His criticism was aimed as much at the leadership of his own party as it was at Mr. Obama — revealing what many insiders knew at that time: Bitter debates were going on among Democratic leaders and inside the West Wing about Mr. Obama’s emphasis on the wrong issue at the wrong time.
Disagreement in the first two years about putting health care reform, instead of economic growth and jobs, at the front of the line ran throughout Mr. Obama’s top advisers.
Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel argued vociferously in backroom battles to deal first and foremost on getting the economy back on track. In the end, though, Mr. Obama was more focused on his legacy as the father of national health care than on putting jobless, middle-class Americans back to work.
Mr. Schumer, among the Democrats’ most liberal leaders in the Senate, was one of Mr. Emanuel’s strongest allies in that fight, but he was overruled by his party and got in line with the White House orders.
Mr. Schumer’s blockbuster speech offered a stinging litany of other complaints about how the Obama administration bungled major foreign and domestic policy issues leading up to the midterm elections.
As the campaigns began, “the parties were in stalemate. But when government failed to deliver on a string of noneconomic issues — the rollout of the Obamacare exchanges, the mishandling of the surge in border crossers, ineptitude at the [Department of Veterans Affairs] and the government’s initial handling of the Ebola threat — people lost faith in the government’s ability to work and then blamed the incumbent governing party, the Democrats,” Mr. Schumer said.
His blistering speech reflected deeper squabbles among Democrats, many of whom openly blame Mr. Obama for their party’s losses.
In a candid interview with The Washington Post, David Krone, the chief of staff for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, flatly blamed Mr. Obama’s unpopularity for his party’s losses in the Senate.
Meantime, as Democrats prepare to turn over control of the Senate to Republicans, it appears that Mr. Obama is about to wound his party once more before the month is out.
The White House announced that he intends to veto a bipartisan $440 billion tax cut deal worked out by his own party’s leaders and Republicans. The deal would make a number of tax breaks permanent for millions of businesses and individuals that are due to expire.
These are, for the most part, popular, pro-growth, pro-jobs tax credits that have been extended year after year in short-term periods and that the legislation would make permanent. Among them: small-business investment tax credits, tax breaks for college costs and charitable giving, and deductions for state and local taxes.
Mr. Obama’s veto would be the equivalent of a stick in the eye of Mr. Reid, who worked out the compromise. Letting these tax breaks expire now when the economy remains uneven at best will only undermine the recovery, which shows signs of slowing in the fourth quarter.
Mr. Reid faced a lot of anger in his closed-door caucus last month, with at least a half-dozen Democrats voting against him. He managed to hold on to his leadership post — only this time it will be in the minority.
“I voted for a change, and that change was not voting for this leadership,” said Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who saw Republicans capture Senate and House seats in the once-Democratic bastion.
Other Democrats stuck with Mr. Reid but didn’t shrink from publicly placing the full blame for their party’s humiliating losses on Mr. Obama. “This was, whether we like it or not, a referendum on the president in a lot of these states,” said Sen. Christopher Murphy of Connecticut.
Mr. Schumer, who has been the Democrats’ message maker in the Senate, no doubt thinks he should be its leader, and maybe one day he will be. But his scorched-earth speech exposed the deep, open wounds that now fester within his party’s debilitated, divided ranks.
For the next two years, Mr. Obama will have to contend not only with a Republican-run Congress but also with what remains of his embittered party, which sees him as the cause of all its troubles.
• Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist and contributor to The Washington Times.
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