So what do you suppose Senator Schumer has up his sleeve? The latest shellacking by the voters was barely dry when the senior senator of New York stepped before the podium at the National Press Club and gave a speech declaring that Obamacare was a terrible mistake. It was targeted to help only those without insurance, which is too few, he averred. So the senator who aspires to lead a Democratic majority in 2016 promised a debate within the Democratic Party. He shrank from predicting the outcome, but vowed that eventually the Democrats would have specific policy proposals.

Permit us to hazard a guess. At some point Senator Schumer is going to come out for protectionism. We could be wrong, but that’s our guess after listening to the senator’s speech. Since World War II, it’s about the last major policy blunder the Democrats haven’t tried in a big way. If the senator is worried about how narrowly the alleged benefits of Obamacare were focused, protectionism is a strategy that is used to promise, however erroneously, more jobs across the economy. That it does so by raising prices — in effect, taxing consumers — gets lost in the fray. As does the inevitability of countermeasures in other countries that plunge us toward depression.

This, however, hasn’t stopped Mr. Schumer before. He emerged in the protectionist camp with an op-ed piece published in the New York Times late in his first term. It was written with a fallen-away editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts. The idea of an intellectual partnership between the left-wing senator and the right-wing columnist struck us at the time as bizarre. They feared that Amerca was, as they put it, “entering a new economic era in which American workers will face direct global competition at almost every job level.”

Messrs. Schumer and Roberts offered anecdotal evidence suggesting what they called “a seismic shift in the world economy.” It was, they wrote, brought about by “new political stability” that was “allowing capital and technology to flow far more freely around the world.” Plus the emergence of “strong educational systems” that were “producing tens of millions of intelligent, motivated workers in the developing world.” And the invention of “inexpensive, high-bandwidth communications” that were making it “feasible for large work forces to be located and effectively managed anywhere.”

Their brainstorm was that instead of welcoming this America should consider protectionism. The big problem for them was that, at the time, America had, in George W. Bush, a free-market president, as it had had, in Bill Clinton, in the 1990s and, before that, in George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Then came President Obama, who made his priority Obamacare, precipitating the electoral wave that has now swept the Democrats out of power in the Senate. And brought Mr. Schumer to the National Press Club to articulate his regrets and promise a vast debate among the Democrats in advance of the 2016 election.

Not that the senator spoke about protectionism in his speech last week. He did not. Nor did he use the word “seismic” to describe the shifts that have landed the Democrats in their current predicament, out of power in the Congress, out-numbered on the highest court in the land, and with a president whose job approval is testing historic lows — and facing a Republican party that is brimming with ideas, full of optimism, and intellectually more diverse than the Democrats. But he did aver that the “tectonic plates” are moving in the pr-government direction.

It’s hard to think, though, of what else Mr. Schumer is going to come up with in his promised debate. The Democrats have already tried hiking taxes, over-regulating business, debasing the dollar, nationalizing health care, levying a “war” against poverty, lowering educational standards, and bailing out the automobile industry. They’re getting down to the bottom of the socialist barrel. So on the basis of a process of elimination, if nothing else, where is Mr. Schumer going to turn but to protectionism and its related arts of xenophobia?

The Democrats may try to press this on a bi-partisan basis (they are in the Senate and House minority, after all). A decade ago, Mr. Schumer roped in a Republican, Senator Graham of South Carolina, to join him in proposing trade restrictions on China, leading Lawrence Kudlow to label him “Smoot Schumer,” after Senator Reed Smoot, the Republican co-author of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs that, in 1930, helped precipitate America into the Great Depression. Let us say again, that Mr. Schumer is nursing a new bid for protectionism is merely a guess that we’re hazarding. But if Mr. Schumer obliges, well, you read it here first.