How Obama Marginalized the Democratic Party

I can't get enough of this meme!

From Ed Morrissey, at the Fiscal Times:

Chuck Schumer let the cat out of the bag on Monday, but only Democrats found his remarks surprising in the least. Schumer, a member of the Senate Democratic caucus leadership that will have to transition to the minority in January, tried to acknowledge the verdict delivered by voters three weeks earlier.

In a defense of big-government solutions, Schumer allowed that Democrats let their enthusiasm for nanny-state policies get the best of them in 2009, after winning the presidential election, the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

“Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them,” declared the senior Senator from New York. At the time, the middle class had just experienced the economic shock of their lives, and the election was a mandate to change direction from Bush-era economic policies, Schumer told the National Press Club. “We took their mandate,” Schumer explained, “and put all focus on the wrong problem – healthcare reform.”

That’s not to say that Obamacare itself was a mistake, Schumer took care to add, but that the rush to pass a big nanny-state program ahead of economic issues in the middle of a crisis made Democrats appear out of touch with voters. “We should have done it. We just shouldn't have done it first,” Schumer explained.

“We were in the middle of a recession. People were hurting and saying, 'What about me? I'm losing my job. It's not health care that bothers me. What about me?’" Even worse, Schumer argued, the program only provided benefits to “about 5 percent of the electorate,” while “only about a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote.”

Coming from a senior member of Democratic Party leadership, the admission that Democrats blew it with Obamacare contradicts everything the party has argued since the 2010 midterms...

More.