Schumer vs. Kerry
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The winner in yesterday’s debate among Senator Schumer, Assemblyman Howard Mills, and Marilyn O’Grady was President Bush. This became clear when Mr. Schumer, a Democrat, took on his two colleagues in the world’s greatest deliberative body, John Kerry and John Edwards, who are his party’s nominees for president and vice president. Mr. Schumer did not attack them by name, but anyone who has been even casually following the presidential race knows that Messrs. Kerry and Edwards both voted for the war in Iraq but against $87 billion to support the troops there. Mr. Schumer voted for the war and for the $87 billion. “I voted for the $87 billion to back up our soldiers,” Mr. Schumer said. “I’m never going to leave our soldiers high and dry, and I didn’t when I voted for the $87 billion.”
What a remarkable moment. New York’s senior senator is accusing his own party’s presidential and vice presidential nominee of voting “to leave our soldiers high and dry.” Maybe Karl Rove can use the sound bite from Senator Schumer to make a Republican attack ad in suburban Philadelphia and Cleveland or even in Florida, where, incidentally, Senator Lieberman, another Democrat who understands the security question, has been traipsing around suggesting that Mr. Bush would be better for Israel than Mr. Kerry. In respect of the issue of negotiating a settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, Mr. Schumer certainly made clear yesterday that he has differences with Mr. Kerry, who has been witheringly critical of Mr. Bush’s handling of the issue.
Mr. Kerry has been accusing Mr. Bush of failing to “engage” with Israel and the Arabs. “If elected president I will guarantee you that I will work continuously, never disengaging as this administration did for so long,” Mr. Kerry said in a May speech to the Anti-Defamation League. “Ignoring or downplaying the conflict, as the Bush administration did for far too long, is a very dangerous game,” Mr. Kerry told the Arab American Institute in October of 2003. In a December 2003 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Kerry said, “President Bush pays lip service to the idea that Mideast peace is critical to the effort to combat terrorism, but his administration has lurched from episodic involvement to recurrent disengagement, jeopardizing, in my judgment, and in the judgment of many, the security of Israel, encouraging Palestinian extremists, and undermining our own long-term national interests and the efforts of the war on terror in the long run.”
The kind of language Mr. Kerry is using is code for a plan to pressure Israel, the way Secretary of State Albright did during the Clinton administration, into being more forthcoming in its negotiations with the Arabs. Mr. Schumer clearly wants none of that. When asked yesterday in the debate about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, the senior Democrat from New York pronounced himself in “more or less complete agreement with President Bush.” The “barrier to peace,” Mr. Schumer said, is Yasser Arafat. So much for Mr. Kerry’s theory that the barrier to peace is Mr. Bush. Maybe in the next Senate debate, Mr. Mills and Dr. O’Grady should decline to appear and just let Mr. Schumer debate Mr. Kerry. Now there’s a clash we’d enjoy watching.