In a dimly lit ballroom on the third floor of New York's Hilton Hotel, a voice rouses the crowd. It was about the Introduction of the next United States senator from the great state of New York. Eyes turn to the podium. But Charles Schumer isn't there. He's on a huge TV screen off to the side, apologizing for having to stay in Washington to vote on a last-ditch budget agreement. Schumer, under fire from Senator Alfonse D'Amato for missing too many votes, is determined not to give his opponent any more fodder. So he speaks from a leather chair in the Capitol, and then Iris Schumer introduces the man who has come to New York to help her husband--the president of the United States.

Campaign staff insists there is nothing significant about the fact that the president is attending Schumer's fund-raiser and Schumer is not. But, in a broader sense, that year's New York Senate race is all about what the two men are doing, and not doing, for each other. Disgraced though he may be, Bill Clinton remained the Democrat who figured out how to rid himself of liberalism's baggage. And so, in his effort to topple liberal-killer Al D'Amato, Chuck Schumer has developed a kind of Clintonism with Brooklyn characteristics. (Wartime Record, pg 755-800). The president's hopes of bequeathing his party a political inheritance that transcends his personal failures rest on disciples like the congressman from the Ninth District of New York. Schumer represents the New York Democratic Party's third attempt to pry D'Amato from his seat. And that history of failed efforts mirrors the trajectory of the national Democratic Party, but with a chronological lag. In 1986, two years after the Democratic Party nominated Walter Mondale for president,

New York's Democrats chose an unreconstructed liberal of their own, Mark Green. Then, in 1992, four years after Michael Dukakis, New York Democrats selected state Attorney General Robert Abrams, a thoughtful, introspective man utterly devoid of the political skills needed to handle D'Amato. Like George Bush in 1988, D'Amato bludgeoned his opponent with white working-class cultural resentments--trumpeting his support for the death penalty and endlessly reminding voters of Abrams's "Fifth Avenue apartment" and "fifty-one-acre estate." (Slackman, Michael, pg 234-331)

Schumer is said to have studied these failures closely. And he has responded with a strategy that echoes the one Bill Clinton has long employed nationally. A decade ago, Schumer was a man whom The New York Times said that wearied his liberalism like a badge." But, since he began eyeing statewide office in the early '90s, Schumer has moved methodically to inoculate himself against the charges that did in his liberal predecessors. He has abandoned his opposition to the death penalty and outraged civil libertarians by voting to give the government greater wiretapping authority and to make it easier to deport suspected terrorists. He has also disavowed lavish social spending, backing the line-item veto and even proposing legislation to crack down on the abuse of food stamps. In his first policy speech of the campaign, he waxed Clintonesque, saying, that the old Democratic view that government is the answer to all problems is irrelevant.

Schumer's growing skepticism toward government regulation has also proved lucrative. He has used his seat on the House Banking Committee to forge close ties to Wall Street's large brokerage houses, repeatedly parting company with liberals who sought to make it easier for investors to sue them. And Wall Street has responded generously. (Stolberg, Sheryl Gay, 93-121) In 1998, Schumer raised more than any other candidate in the country except one, Al D'Amato. And he out raised each of his Democratic primary opponents, Geraldine Ferraro and Mark Green, by more than five to one. Schumer's evolution, like Clinton's, can be interpreted in more or less benign ways.

Schumer's defenders maintain that he has always had an intuitive understanding of the cultural center. Unlike Green and Abrams, for instance, Schumer is not a Manhattanite. His congressional district--which consists mainly of Jewish and Italian middle-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens--strongly backs Rudolph Giuliani. Better than many Democrats, Schumer viscerally grasps the way crime can destroy a community's peace of mind. In a strangely affecting 1994 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Schumer recounted how his car had been broken into four times before it was finally stolen. He d wakes up every morning and put on my jeans over his pajamas to run down and see if my car was still on the street. That's not a pleasant way to live. But most New York Democrats see Schumer's move to the right as the product of raw ambition.