The 2014 election drubbing for Democrats, Schumer said, was not "a repudiation of government" but a rejection of government incompetence. He blamed the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov last year, the scandalous reports out of the Veterans Administration, and the federal government's lackluster initial response to the child-migrant border crisis and the Ebola outbreak for the party's defeat at the polls.

But his more noteworthy critique was of the pursuit of health reform itself: In his harshest assessment of the Obama presidency to date, Schumer argued that the White House and congressional Democrats erred by focusing on the Affordable Care Act throughout most of 2009 and early 2010 rather than following the passage of the economic stimulus with other targeted economic legislation that would directly help more people. He said voters had given the party a mandate in 2008 to stop the financial crisis and reverse the economic damage done to the middle class, and while he supported the substance of Obamacare, it was a political loser because it offered its most tangible benefit—access to coverage for the uninsured—to just 5 percent of the voting public. "Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them," he said. "We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem: healthcare reform." (While top Obama advisers like Rahm Emanuel, his first chief of staff, also opposed the healthcare push at the time, the president and Democratic leaders consistently argue that the benefits of the law accrue to a much larger portion of the electorate.)

Schumer has always targeted his political message toward the middle class: Witness his 2007 book, titled Positively American: Winning Back the Middle Class Majority One Family At a Time. But while that book contained many of the same ideas that are priorities for Democrats today—immigration reform, college affordability, etc—it downplayed the decades-long battle over the size and scope of government that he now believes the party should join in full.

Despite this year's election results, Schumer argued that his party is better positioned than Republicans to win back and sustain a majority. He predicted that the GOP, with its opposition to government solutions, would fail over the next two years to enact policies that help the middle class.

But for Democrats to win, the federal government has to perform well, and in that sense Schumer put the pressure for victory in 2016 not on Congress but back on the Obama administration. "When government messes up," he warned, "we can easily lose."

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