Chuck Schumer says it was a mistake for Democrats to pass Obamacare in 2010

 Well, this story comes out of left field–pun fully intended: During a speech earlier today Chuck Schumer admitted that the Democrats were wrong to focus on healthcare reform after the mandate they received in the 2008 election.

  Here is some of what he had to say on this:

he argued that the Democrats acted wrongly in using their new mandate after the 2008 election to focus on the issue rather than the economy at the height of a terrible recession.

“After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus, but unfortunately Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them,” Schumer said. “We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem—health care reform.”

The third-ranking Senate Democrat noted that just about 5 percent of registered voters in the United States lacked health insurance before the implementation of the law, arguing that to focus on a problem affecting such “a small percentage of the electoral made no political sense.”

The larger problem, affecting most Americans, he said, was a poor economy resulting from the recession. “When Democrats focused on health care, the average middle-class person thought, ‘The Democrats aren’t paying enough attention to me,’ ” Schumer said.

The health care law should have come later, Schumer argued, after Democrats had passed legislation to help the middle class weather the recession. Had Democrats pushed economic legislation, he said, “the middle class would have been more receptive to the idea that President Obama wanted to help them” and, in turn, they would have been more receptive to the health care law.

Schumer said he told fellow Democrats in the lead-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act that it was the wrong time to pass the law.

“People thought—and I understand this—lots of people thought this was the only time to do this, it’s very important to do. And we should have done it. We just shouldn’t have done it first,” he said. “We were in the middle of a recession. People were hurting and saying, ‘What about me? I’m losing my job. It’s not health care that bothers me. What about me?’ … About 85 percent of all Americans were fine with their health care in 2009, mainly because it was paid for by either the government or their employer, private sector. So they weren’t clamoring. The average middle-class voter, they weren’t opposed to doing health care when it started out, but it wasn’t at the top of the agenda.”

  Of course he supports the legislation–he is not arguing the point about whether or not healthcare reform was needed but rather the timing of the decision–he is basically saying that the Democrats took their eye off the ball because they saw an opportunity to pass legislation they had longed for for years instead of focusing fully on the economy–which is what the American voters had expected the Democrats to focus on. Still, this is a striking and startling revelation from such a powerful Democrat.

  I have always found it interesting that healthcare reform became such a large topic, both during the 2008 election and in the wake of it, when there were larger problems which affected more Americans which should have been dealt with first and now Chuck Schumer, of all people, has validated something that I have always wondered about.

  It is clear to me that the Democrats saw an opportunity to pass legislation they have craved for and they decided to go for it instead of focusing on issues which were more important to a majority of the voters. They put their politics ahead of everything else.

  This is the one time I agree with Chuck Schumer and it makes me wonder what he is up to…