Chuck Schumer on Wall Street and Left & Right Wing Blogs

I found these two quotes to be interesting, they’re from an interview in The New Republic:

IC: You and Mayor Bloomberg, in 2007, said that reregulating Wall Street would cause people to flee overseas to London. That is very different than Warren.

CS: It has got to be, to me, a careful balance, OK? Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession. And to sit there and do nothing, or do what the Republicans want—repeal Dodd-Frank—makes no sense. But on the other hand, I think that you just don’t attack Wall Street because they’re successful or rich.

I just unsuccessfully, with Bloomberg, supported raising the building height in midtown Manhattan, so we could build more office buildings. Office buildings are our factories—imagine the people of Michigan saying, “We don’t want to build a new auto factory, because the Ford family will get richer, or the person who builds the factory will make money.” You’ve got to look at the effect on average folks. The vast majority of the people employed by Wall Street are the secretary who goes in to work on the Long Island Rail Road, who makes fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year. I’m not saying Elizabeth does this, but there are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.

IC: You don’t think Elizabeth Warren makes a villain out of Wall Street?

CS: I am just going to leave it at what I said.

Okay, I get this, he is an anti-populist, most mainline establishment Democrats are. This is because they get most of their funding from big businesses, believe it or not. Warren is a fluke and what I would call a liberal version of a Tea Partier. Grassroots and all that.

However, this quote here really made me wonder:

IC: Forget Warren then. Is this a problem for your party?

CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

We do? That is news to me. I have not had anyone from the Republican Party contact me at all. Of course, I am a Paleoconservative and a good majority of the Republican Party is pretty much Neoconservative; but I digress. I think Schumer might be overstating that one a bit. I can tell you this; if Schumer is saying that the right-wing blogs are taking marching orders from the RNC, then he is very highly mistaken. Anyone who reads the blogs on the right knows that the grassroots/tea party crowd, which does make up a good amount of the Blogosphere; is not very happy with the RNC at all.

So, this idea that the right-wing blogs have some sort of special inside clout with the party, I believe, is a mistaken assumption on Schumer’s part.

Others: Post PoliticsMock Paper ScissorsDaily KosShakesvilleTalking Points MemoOutside the BeltwayNo More Mister Nice BlogThe DishAlthouse. (Via Memeornadum)