I know that many of you are going to find this title imflamatory but I believe this is a perfectly valid conclusion (slight hyperbole) given the speech he gave at a GA. fundraiser.
Several times I have been attacked by people at this web site for saying Bob Casey was annointed by the party machine to run against Santorum in Pa. I believe that the field is being cleared for him. I also suspect that there are several posters here who work for Schumer and/or the DSCC and drive these diary debates on Casey, with the core talking points about Casey "doing so well in the polls" and "no one else can win". I have seen several play dumb about the fact that polls can be commisioned by Schumer and the DSCC to use in convincing the rest of us that Casey or Ford of TN or some other of their annointed candidates are the ONLY ones who can win against the republican and make the nomination seem inevitable. (have we learned nothing from the electable argument of 2004?)
We are a LONG way from the 2006 primaries and Schumer is talking as if the voting is over. I am not okay with that. I am not okay with him and Reid going around the country and deciding who will be the party's candidate and threatening to step in to control the "attacks" against their chosen candidates. I think this is cynical political opportunism on Schumer's part and I also think it is a losing strategy.
There is an audio tape of his whole speech but I can not post it all. The person hosting the audio clips can not afford the bandwidth for all the hits the clip would get, but I am going to post a short snip of it. I will also post some of the statements I was able to transcribe as I listened. There is quite a bit I left out but none of it changes the general tone of what was said.
Harry Reid came to his position when the DSCC was in debt. He came up with the idea to have democratic senators take money from their war chests to pay off DSCC debt rather than going to contributors...... etc... he is a great leader.
"Mark Pryor is on charge of southeast region, great senator, the kind of guy who will go above and beyond to get the job done, hard worker etc..." (Me: he is also anti choice and votes that way)
(Then Schumer talks about how bad the theocrats are, they want to take America away from all of us. Only 45 democrats in the senate stand between us and the theocrats agenda. He makes some very good points.)
We went around the country and begged democrats in red states not to retire...(good strategy, if rather obvious politics 101)
Clip here of short section of speech.
Our number one target is Santorum, he should go back to Md. or where ever he lives. So I called up Governor Rendell and I asked him who is the best candidate to beat Santorum and Rendell said "There is only one candidate who can beat him and that is Bob Casey but he won't run and you won't want him too because he is pro-life, he is a deeply religious Catholic man. So I said "those days are over Ed, yes I am pro-choice, but we need the best candidate. We can't insist that every democrat check off 18 different issues before they get <noise>(perhaps he said "get to run") So we got Harry to persuade Casey to run and Casey is winning in the polls. Etc...
And we are doing this in the other states. The American people smell the extremism in the air.
He goes on to talk about how they are going to pick off vulnerable republicans etc.. (good idea), but he talks about how Ford is going to be the nominee.. He talks about who is going to be the candidate if Lott retires. In other words, there will in effect be no more democratic primaries. Chuck Schumer thinks party insiders should choose your candidates for you.
Now I applaud his desire to take back the senate but not at the expense of women's civil rights and constitutional rights and not at the expense of democracy, our right to chose our candidates. The days of democrats keeping their mouths shut and voting for whoever the party picks are OVER. How can the DLC be so far behind the trends in politics? Make no mistake, this is just more DLC manipulation of the process to get their choices in office. How can they be so ignorant about the anger and motivation of the grassroots movement?
They are the one who gave us our minority status and they seem determined to continue the trend.