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His moment

Schumer seized opportunity in ports flap to raise his profile

BY GLENN THRUSH | NEWSDAY WASHINGTON BUREAU

March 12, 2006

WASHINGTON - George W. Bush's Dubai nightmare began early last month, the moment Chuck Schumer fielded a call from an Associated Press reporter asking New York's senior senator to comment on an obscure plan to rejigger operations at six U.S. ports.

It was a call to action for Schumer, who has a preternatural gift for scouting catchy political issues and packaging them for political gain. Before the White House even realized the ports might be a problem, Schumer had resolved to use the deal to undermine GOP claims that Democrats are soft on national security just months before crucial midterm elections.

"It's sort of like a war and there are moments when the enemy is exposed and you should strike - you have to strike - to gain victory," said Schumer, who is leading the Democrats' effort to take back control of the Senate. "The longer you wait, the less leverage you have."

It's not surprising that Schumer, whose love of publicity is legendary, was the first politician to hop on the Dubai issue. But it was his persistence and inventiveness that impressed many observers, who say the episode marks his transformation from gadfly to party gladiator.

"I think people on Capitol Hill now realize that Chuck Schumer knows politics as well as anybody," said Marshall Wittmann, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who works at the moderate Democratic Leadership Council.

"Chuck has an instinct for what the street thinks. He knows what the guy at the corner deli is thinking about. A lot of senators lose it when they're in Washington, but Chuck never did."

Searching for a way to describe Schumer, Wittmann settled on a Yiddish word, which roughly translated means "common sense."

"He's got sachel," Wittmann said.

House Homeland Security chairman Peter King (R-Seaford), who allied himself with Schumer, said, "Chuck knows how to work the media. But I had no idea of just how dogged and unrelenting he is, and that's what keeps an issue alive."

In the days following the publication of the first story on the ports on Feb. 11, Schumer issued his maiden press release on the issue and began pelting reporters with requests to follow up the wire service story, hectoring his communications staff to keep the issue alive.

Touching off a revolt

On Feb. 13, King joined the fight, which Schumer credits for sparking a Republican revolt that eventually resulted in Dubai Ports World withdrawing from the deal last week, handing Bush his humiliating defeat.

"Pete coming on board, that's what launched it. It became a missile," Schumer says.

Schumer's willingness to reach out to Republicans, moderate and conservative, also helped. On Feb. 16, Schumer appeared on right-wing talk radio host Michael Savage's radio show after Savage had been whipping up pro-Bush conservatives against the deal. After the appearance, Savage, whose Web site links to anti-Islamic articles and videos of hostage beheadings in Iraq, was so impressed with Schumer he promised to rewrite anti-Schumer passages in his recently published book.

"My strategy from the start was that we got to keep this bipartisan as much as possible," Schumer said in an interview Friday.

Schumer managed to coax several GOP senators to co-sponsor a bill that would have required congressional approval for the Dubai deal, but it could have been weeks before that measure came up for a vote. By Wednesday, eager to exploit rising public outrage against the deal, Schumer parted ways with his GOP co-sponsors and demanded an immediate up-or-down Dubai vote.

To do so, he resorted to an unusual and controversial parliamentary ambush. Rising as if he were going to make a speech, Schumer instead announced he was inserting an anti-ports amendment into a second amendment that was already being debated as part of the Senate ethics bill. The move infuriated Senate leaders, who later realized they could have stopped Schumer with a simple objection. "What Sen. Schumer did was deplorable," said conservative Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who claimed it was a violation of protocol.

It also ticked off Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), whose amendment was the target of Schumer's parliamentary gambit, said one person on the floor at the time.

Share limelight, some say

While most of his fellow Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), are quick to credit Schumer with winning the Dubai battle, there have been murmurs of dissent. Some say that Schumer, delighted by the attention, didn't share enough limelight with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who faces a tough race this November against Republican Tom Kean Jr.

Several Democratic aides told Newsday that Schumer should have bolstered Menendez's election chances by giving him a higher-profile role in the fight - maybe even allowing the freshman to introduce the anti-Dubai amendment instead of Schumer. "Chuck is great, but he's selfish," said one Democratic operative based in New York. "Robert could have really used the help."

A source close to Schumer said he took the leading role because Menendez simply didn't have the parliamentary experience to pull off the maneuver.

Wittmann, for one, dismisses such quibbles, saying that Schumer has made national security an issue Democrats can run on, not run away from.

"He's lowered the gap between the Democrats and Republicans on defense," Wittmann said. "It may very well be an ephemeral victory, but the Democrats will take it. Chuck gave them an issue - Dubai - that they're going to bring up over and over again."