The Other McCain

During my Iowa trip, I got lots of photos and videos I wasn’t able to upload at the time due to connectivity issues and the very hectic schedule. One of the items that never made it to the blog was an incident at the Iowa State Fair where DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz got heckled offstage by an angry liberal. I was able to phone in a report to The American Spectator, but never got around to uploading video of the incident.

The video is about two minutes, and at about the 40-second mark, you see Wasserman-Schultz say, “The difference between Barack Obama and congressional Democrats and all the Republican presidential candidates is that all of them committed to end Medicare as we know it . . . and privatize Social Security.” This elicits a predictable chorus of boos from her Democratic audience, but it also inspired the angry liberal heckler – you’ll see him in a yellow T-shirt — to start yelling that the debt deal “put Medicare on the chopping block!” He also yells: “Stop caving in to Wall Street!” Watch:

As you see, at the 1:15 mark, Democrat loyalists try to shout down the heckler by chanting, “Debbie! Debbie!” But at the 1:30 mark, Yellow Shirt starts heckling again, which prompts Wasserman-Schultz to cut straight to her peroration – something about the great “victory” that awaits in 2012 – and end her speech well before her allotted 15 minutes were up.

Following her offstage in hope that she would hold a brief press conference, I then caught the denouement as other angry liberals – the first one wearing a “Catholic Worker” T-shirt – interrogated her about the same basic issue. Wasserman-Schultz evidently knew this guy, addressing him as “David.”

The exchange was interrupted periodically by the congresswoman’s entourage, but as much as was audible went like this:

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ:  “As someone who represents a district in South Florida, there’s nobody who fights harder to protect Medicare . . .”

FIRST LIBERAL: “You voted for the debt-ceiling bill . . . . Why don’t you have five minutes to sit down and talk?”

ENTOURAGE WOMAN:  “Because, David, it’s not built in. Don’t act like this is — you know how . . .”

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ:  “I’m happy to talk to you . . .”

FIRST LIBERAL: “You talk the talk, but your actions don’t back up the talk.”

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ:  “Oh, you know, with all due respect . . .”

FIRST LIBERAL: “Obama was the one that put cuts to Social Security and Medicare on the table.”

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ:  “That is simply not true and you know it and that is an unacceptable …”

SECOND LIBERAL: “He said everything was on the table.”

FIRST LIBERAL: “And you voted for the debt-ceiling bill, Debbie – you voted for that bill.”

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ:  “Because we needed to come together to address our deficit …”

SECOND LIBERAL: “Why is it always Democrats compromising with other Democrats?”

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ: “Call me, David. We’ll talk later.”

It was a very enlightening glimpse at how a powerful Democrat – herself a leader of “progressives” in Congress – cannot satisfy the implacable demands of her own party’s left-wingers. Just something to keep in mind, next time someone tries to tell you that Republicans are the party beholden to fringe extremist wingnuts.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

And Ed Driscoll readers, too! (I’m sure the Trotsky reference was a just a coincidence, comrade.)

UPDATE II: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s Left-Wing Iowa Antagonist ID’d as David Goodner.