Taegan Goddard’s
Political Wire
3/29/2011
Moments before a conference call with reporters and “apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) “began to instruct fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process,” the New York Times reports.
Schumer told them to portray House Speaker John Boehner (D-OH) “as painted into a box by the Tea Party, and to decry the spending cuts that he wants as extreme.”
Said Schumer: “I always use the word extreme. That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”
“A minute or two into the talking-points tutorial, though, someone apparently figured out that reporters were listening, and silence fell.”
Update: More thoughts about this at RedState.com and at Weasel Zippers, Top Senate Republican Scolds Schumer for Telling Fellow Dems to Label GOP Lawmakers “Extreme”
