Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spent decades telling Jewish audiences that his name meant something important. In a 2010 interview with Jewish radio host Nachum Segal, Schumer said it “comes from the word shomer, guardian…
Page B1From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
Democratic leaders welcome compromise for power, show the socialist wing the door instead.
As it ran on the front
BIG TENT DEMOCRATIC COALITION, born sometime around the New Deal, of complicated and mixed parentage, died this week, of what the family is calling 'strategic clarity.'
It is survived by a caucus willing to compromise with just about anybody holding a checkbook, and predeceased by its patience for anybody without one. Rahm Emanuel, never a man accused of sentimentality, delivered what amounted to the eulogy himself, telling the party's socialist wing that if they wanted a different platform they were welcome to run as a separate party. Not asked to leave the room. Told there's a door, and it's over there.…
…(cont) Meanwhile, across the hall, the tent's other flank got the opposite treatment — the compromises kept coming, quietly, patiently, the way an old machine keeps running on parts nobody remembers ordering. Chuck Schumer's long record of exactly that kind of accommodation was itself the week's news, cataloged in one long piece, no scandal in it, just a list, which is somehow worse. A list is not an accusation. A list is just what happened, laid end to end for anybody willing to read it.
The deceased is not survived by consistency. It is not survived by the idea that a party's left flank gets the same patience as its donor flank. That is, frankly, malarkey, and this obituarist has read enough of these to know malarkey when the paragraph is doing the work a denial should be doing. There's a shit deal buried somewhere in every 'strategic' decision like this one, and nobody on either side of the aisle is in a hurry to itemize it for you.
Whippersnappers who came up believing the party was a coalition, and not a lobby with a mascot, are asked to hold their questions until after the reception.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you register one new voter who isn't already on somebody's list.
“This is the con, plain and simple: they say there's no room in the tent for the socialists, but there's always room for another 'compromise' that keeps the money flowing the same direction it always has. Watch who gets shown the door and who gets shown the budget — that's the whole story of who the party actually works for.”
“Look, party discipline is just good strategy — you can't win a general election running as a coalition with contradictory platforms, and Rahm's just being honest about electability. Is that — did that come out sounding like we're fine with reading people out over their politics? That's not the point I was making.”
The receipts
Former Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel said that he doesn’t view socialists as part of the Democratic Party, a rare pushback against attempts to establish a big-tent party that includes its left flank. In an appearance on Fox News Sunday…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.