Schumer has been quiet on financial reform, and Republicans are revelling in his dilemma. Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark

Charles Schumer, the senior senator from New York, is a voluble politician who has lately been having moments of uncharacteristic reticence. This temperance comes after several years during which Schumer’s national prominence has soared. Since his election to the Senate, in 1998, after an epic campaign in which he unseated the longtime incumbent, Alfonse D’Amato, Schumer has become renowned for a hunger for work and for publicity; he holds press events on many Sundays, to take advantage of what tends to be a slow news day. During the last two election cycles, Schumer served as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, helping to take his party from forty-five to sixty seats in the chamber. His Democratic colleagues, in gratitude, voted him vice-chair of the party conference—the third-ranking leader in the Senate.

Schumer’s prominence has come at some cost. He sits on both the Finance Committee and the Banking Committee, and has long toiled as a principal voice for Wall Street in Washington. But this summer, when he and his colleagues passed the most comprehensive overhaul of securities legislation in more than a generation, Schumer was relegated to a nearly silent role. Earlier this month, Schumer voted for the financial-reform package—without saying much about it.

Just three years ago, in a more typical moment for him, Schumer went to City Hall to announce a different kind of financial-reform plan. He and Mayor Michael Bloomberg had commissioned the consulting firm McKinsey to conduct a study of the future of the financial industry in New York. “I’m obsessed with this issue,” Schumer told assembled reporters on January 22, 2007. Based on interviews with “more than fifty financial services industry CEOs and business leaders,” the McKinsey authors concluded that what Wall Street needed was less regulation. In order to keep the financial industry from fleeing to London and other locations, according to the study, the government had to relax some of the reporting requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which had been passed in response to the collapse of Enron, and to limit lawsuits against Wall Street firms. Schumer said at the event, “We are not going to rest until we change the rules, change the laws, and make sure that New York stays No. 1 for decades on into the future.”

“The McKinsey report was a symptom of the huge amount of pushback from the financial industry,” Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, said recently. “The message was, we need to lighten up on the reins on Wall Street and the corporate community generally. Schumer was one of the leading spokespeople for that message.”

At the time, prosperity on Wall Street seemed part of a virtuous circle for Schumer. More profits meant more jobs for New York and more campaign contributions for the D.S.C.C., for which he raised a record two hundred and forty million dollars. Then, of course, the financial industry imploded, almost taking the American economy with it, and lax regulation turned out to be a principal cause of the debacle.

In this way, Schumer looks the opposite of prescient, and his fund-raising success looks like compensation for his advocacy for Wall Street. It was, for example, a Schumer amendment to legislation in 2006 that barred the Securities and Exchange Commission from overseeing credit-rating agencies, like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service. That change now seems almost reckless, given that credit-rating firms, which were paid by the companies whose often dubious securities they evaluated, played an ignominious role in the crash. Over the years, Schumer has successfully argued for Wall Street’s pet projects, from cutting the fees that financial firms pay to fund the S.E.C. to allowing commercial banks and investment banks to merge.

“The financial-regulatory bill is a total no-win for Chuck,” Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a non-profit organization of the city’s business leadership, said. “He’s been a tremendous advocate for us. What’s changed is that the American public is angry at Wall Street and at Congress.”

The internal politics of the Senate have also served to mute Schumer’s voice. Harry Reid, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, is facing a challenging race for a fifth term in Nevada, potentially opening the door for Schumer to replace him. But, in keeping with senatorial tradition, Schumer must not acknowledge the possibility that the job of leader will become vacant or that he has any interest in filling it. “I hope Harry Reid will be the Majority Leader,” Schumer told me. “It’s not even fair to him to even think about that.”

This kind of silence about political reality, and about his own ambition, does not come easily to any politician, much less one as outspoken as Chuck Schumer. To date, Schumer has paid only a modest political price for his embrace of Wall Street. In his race for a third term, this fall, he has amassed a war chest of nearly twenty-four million dollars, more than any other Senate candidate in the nation, and drawn only token opposition. (The designated Republican contender is Gary Berntsen, a former C.I.A. agent who now runs a consulting firm on Long Island.) Nevertheless, Republicans are revelling in Schumer’s dilemma.

“Schumer is in a tough spot in New York,” John Thune, the Republican senator from South Dakota, who is a likely Presidential candidate in 2012, said. “He raised a lot of money on Wall Street. He’s their advocate here. Now we’re talking about financial reform, and he’s nowhere to be found in that debate.”

Schumer is not entirely quiet these days, at least on safer subjects. Following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Schumer has denounced B.P. with regularity. Over a series of Sundays, he launched a crusade to force airlines to forgo charging passengers for their carry-on luggage.

The departures of Hillary Clinton and Eliot Spitzer from the political scene have left Schumer as indisputably the most nationally prominent New York Democrat. In this role, he has come to seem to many Republicans as the embodiment of undisciplined liberalism. Schumer often dresses in clothes that look like they’ve been stored in tense adjacency to Chinese-food containers. He is six feet tall and turns sixty a few weeks after Election Day, and although he bikes through Brooklyn regularly, to stay fit and to keep an eye on his core constituency, he is far from lithe. In Washington, he lives in a famously unhygienic Capitol Hill town house with three other members of Congress. (“Our rats scare our cockroaches,” said Bill Delahunt, a congressman from Massachusetts, who shares the downstairs living room with Schumer.) In the nineties, according to Schumer, CBS considered doing a situation comedy, to be called “Four in the House,” about the town house, but the project did not come to fruition.

Schumer’s aggressive personal style is so distinctive that it tends to overshadow his substantive views, which do not comport with what many expect of him. “The state needs people who are fiscally conservative, and Schumer is at the other end of the spectrum. He is a big-government liberal,” Edward F. Cox, the chairman of the New York Republican State Committee (and Richard Nixon’s son-in-law), said. “He’s about having more and bigger governmental direction and takeovers of different sectors of the economy, and more government programs that don’t deliver what they promise and have adverse impacts on the national economy.”