The Democratic leaders counting on Senator Schumer to engineer the party’s Senate comeback might be in for a bit of a surprise. Mr. Schumer, we learn from a dispatch in the New York Times, has been teaching fellow Democrats his trademark campaign tactics, such as holding weekly Sunday press conferences and visiting every major city in his state at least one a month. The thinking is that Mr. Schumer proved his campaign savvy with his “record” re-election win, in which the Democrats garnered 71% of the vote.

But this landslide victory, like Senator-elect Obama’s decisive win in Illinois, wasn’t due only to the winner’s brilliant campaign tactics, but to the token nature of the opposition. Mr. Schumer’s opponents included the Conservative Party’s Marilyn O’Grady, a Long Island ophthalmologist who forgot her closing statement during a televised senatorial debate. Mr. Schumer’s Republican opponent, Assemblyman Howard Mills, was more competent but less distinctive on the issues. On all but foreign policy, Mr. Mills ran a campaign essentially indistinguishable from that of a mainstream Democrat.

Obscured in – or by – all this was the feature of Mr. Schumer’s candidacy that was actually distinctive, his willingness to break with his party’s leaders on Iraq and the war on terrorism. “The bottom line is that I voted with the president on authorization to go into Iraq, I voted for the $87 billion to back up our soldiers, and I am never going to leave our soldiers out in the cold,” Mr. Schumer said while Senators Kerry and Edwards struggled to defend their votes against the $87 billion. When it came to the Middle East peace process – which promises to be center stage in the upcoming year – Mr. Schumer proclaimed himself “more or less in complete agreement with President Bush.”

In other words, even from so resolutely a Democratic base as New York City, Mr. Schumer won re-election by running to the right of Messrs. Kerry and Edwards, not to mention Governor Dean. Mr. Schumer hasn’t always been so staunch in this fight. He voted against the Gulf War that the Congress authorized President George H.W. Bush to fight. But Mr. Schumer has come a long way on this issue, with results for all to see. If the Democratic senators up for re-election in 2006 hope to learn something valuable from Mr. Schumer, they might want to pay attention to his platform along with his tactics.