March 14, 2025

A lot of people are furious at Chuck Schumer today. The Senate’s Democratic leader has agreed to accept a short-term Republican proposal to keep the government funded, in return for … something? Maybe? Some goodwill? It’s not entirely clear. There is talk of a tea-party-style revolt on the left, and even some centrist Democrats are saying that they might want someone steelier in charge of that negotiation. It’s a good moment to revisit Jennifer Senior’s profile of Schumer for New York, published in late 2004 as he was chasing votes upstate, visiting small towns and farms far from his downstate base. At the time, he was considered tremendously effective, was about to win his second term in a walk, and had an eye on gaining the governorship two years hence. (Eliot Spitzer eventually ran and won instead, and we all know how that ended.) Jennifer’s portrait is of someone with superb retail-politics skills and real-world legislative vigor — passing generic-drug legislation, pushing back hard against confirming George W. Bush’s right-wing judges — and also someone who specialized in cross-aisle conversations and pragmatic compromise to make things happen. “In fact,” she writes at one point, “Schumer has been so effective, and at moments has shown such a willingness to stray from liberal doctrine, that even the New York Post endorsed Schumer this year.” Back then, she suggests, he was a great and relentless deal-maker, a senator who could work with the likes of John McCain and get good laws passed. Twenty years later, there are no more of those McCains in the Republican Senate, and Schumer, yesterday, came off less canny than hapless.
—Christopher Bonanos, city editor, New York

By Jennifer Senior 

Photo: Gillian Laub

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