Things weren't looking good for the GOP leading up to the much hyped 2006 midterm elections: Iraq was, well, Iraq; the deficit, as a result, was in desperate need of a diet; and, of course, there was Foley Gate. Consequently, the year was good for Democrats who could safely rely on a negative Republican image to take back the Congress.

But now that the Democrats are at the congressional helm, their strategy to keep their seats and take back the White House in 2008 will need a political strategy that is less reactive and more self-sustaining. The search for that strategy is the subject of New York Senator "Chuck" Schumer's first book, Positively American: Winning Back The Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time.

Schumer, as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is credited as one of the primary engineers of the victorious Democratic campaign strategy leading up to the 2006 elections. He devotes the first half of the book to laying out two problems that have politically hurt the Democrats in years past: a failure to develop a concrete Democratic platform and to connect it to the middle-class majority. In the second half of the book, Schumer offers twelve "50 percent" non-comprehensive solutions he hopes will set the groundwork for the development of a cohesive Democratic agenda in the years ahead.

Positively American begins on an autobiographical note, giving the reader a glimpse into Schumer's background, including his years at Harvard in the early 1970s where he went in pursuing corporate law — at the urging of his parents — and came out with a throbbing desire for politics, after having "caught the bug" while campaigning with the Harvard Young Democrats for the presidential candidacy of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Schumer also writes about his underdog bid for New York Senator against the formidable Republican incumbent Alfonse D'Amato. It is here where he drives home the point that his success against D'Amato (beating him by 11 percentage points) relied on his campaigning as a "meat and potatoes" Democrat. Earlier in his campaign, Schumer found that excessively touting standard Democratic issues — the woman's right to choose, gun-control, affirmative action — caused many in his audiences to drift. "The traditional Democratic themes had lost their potency," writes Schumer. This is not to say Schumer doesn't believe in standard Democratic issues; rather, he found more success on the campaign emphasizing standard middle-class concerns, such as the mortgage payment, cost of college tuition, property taxes, electricity bills, and so on.

The New York Senate race was also when Schumer came to know "the Baileys," the middle-class couple who helped center his middle-class message. They weren't real, granted, but they were a prototype inspired by all the average Americans Schumer knew from his background growing up in middle-class south Brooklyn and through his years as a public servant.

Schumer uses the Baileys throughout his book whenever emphasizing the middle-class — they seem decidedly centrist without an ideological tinge. The Baileys are traditional in that they tend to trust in the structures provided for them by religion, work, and government. They embrace the cornerstone of the American system, democracy and capitalism, though they worry about corporate corruption. And while they are not puritanical, as parents they do worry about the moral excesses filtering through television and the Internet. So why the Baileys? Because, argues Schumer, this third of the electorate is not made up of party ideologues and that means they are up for grabs in elections. It would be fatal, says Schumer, for Democrats to shape their platform without appealing to "all the different Baileys around the country..."

Unfortunately, the Baileys have become increasingly disconnected from the Democratic Party over the years, and Schumer offers a thoughtful analysis on why that is so. Part of it, he says, is the failure of the party to adapt to the times. In the 1930s and '40s, when most Americans were reeling economically from the Great Depression, the idea of bigger government naturally served the Democrats well, writes Schumer. But as Democratic policies began to benefit more people, these same people eventually became socially and economically more secure and comfortable, and in their eyes many programs offered by the government began to be viewed as superfluous. The Democrats, on the other hand, were still defining their platform in terms of the poor, rather than in terms of both the poor and the middle-class.

As Schumer writes:

But Schumer is not suggesting that the Republicans have supplanted the Democrats as the party of the middle-class. The Republican machine, argues Schumer, has been concocted by two groups whose interests are not in line with the majority of Americans: theocrats and economic royalists. Theocrats want to impose their faith on the government. They are the Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertsons of our society and their desire to blend church and state, writes Schumer, is "why many of the Founding Fathers put down their plows and picked up their muskets to fight."

Economic royalists for their part are motivated by sheer greed, and pour a great deal of money into shaping public policy by way of think tanks and research — primarily conducted by pollsters and wordsmiths. Their primary goal is to convince the electorate that unfettered free market capitalism serves the average American's interests, and that any government regulation is always bad. Together these two groups — with the help of Dick Cheney — have not only stirred up fear and division, but have generated a cohesive message that has successfully served the GOP during elections. In 2004, they were eight words: "War in Iraq. Cut taxes. No Gay marriage."

This hairpins us back to the main problem with the Democrats: they do not have their respective eight word message, nor a comparably strong political machine; nevertheless, Schumer argues that Democrats should work toward that end; in the meantime, he offers his list of non-comprehensive ideas, called the "50 percent solution," he hopes will bridge the party to a more concrete, general message.

Many of Schumer's solutions are obvious and sensible, such as increasing reading and math scores, increasing the number of college graduates, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil; to his credit, Schumer doesn't avoid explaining in minute detail just how they can be accomplished.

Take the goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil by fifty percent. Schumer, ever the centrist, talks both of doubling CAFE standards (already facing a uphill battle in Congress) and the creation a government agency, called the National Energy Efficiency Development Administration, that will fund and regulates public and private research on energy efficiency.

Another is the lofty goal of increasing reading and math scores by 50 percent by implementing a federal achievement standard. The government will not force schools to adopt the new gold standard, but encourages them to by offering to triple funding per student (from $860 to $2,800) for schools that do and are able to show achievement results. These results in turn "will be available to states, districts and schools that want to use them diagnostically." Schumer's idea, of course, is reminiscent of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. But the NCLB has failed, says Schumer, largely because the Bush Administration did not adequately fund and administer it. In addition to this gold standard, Schumer proposes salary enhancements for science and math teachers who demonstrate subject competency and pedagogical skills (Schumer has apparently shopped the idea around Capitol Hill with some positive responses).

But the problem with some of Schumer's solutions is not that they aren't doable by a willful people, but that they assume a willful people. Some ideas, such as taxing fast-food advertising to fund a national ad campaign to combat childhood obesity will really translate into a fast-food tax on consumers. These taxes, of course, will be balked at as "sin taxes." The same problem befalls his proposal to tax porn sites to fund age verification software.

Furthermore, many of Schumer's ideas seemed infused by the same quixotic spirit Ronald Reagan used half-heartedly in the '80s to win elections (anyone remember the constitutional balanced budget amendment?). As a consequence, many readers will write off Schumer's solutions as another half-hearted laundry list by a conniving politician.

This, of course, is where vision would sorely help. But as Schumer admits, the Democrats don't have one yet (perhaps another way of saying they aren't ready to commit). Vision, he says, will take time to develop while the Democrats test the political waters with their proposals in the next year and a half. Positively American, as thoughtful and promising as it sounds, reflects how much a tour de force the uphill battle to 2008 will be.

— Jeremy Carlos Foster (jcarlosfoster at gmail dot com)