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 B4From§Eachthe milkman edition — 31 August 2026
Democratic Party's patience for its left wing pronounced dead, Rahm officiating.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: The Democratic Party's patience for its own left flank died this week, at the ripe old age of, depending on who you ask, either twelve years or forty, in the marble hallways of the House and Senate, of complications from repeated compromise.
It is survived by former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who delivered the eulogy himself, informing the deceased's would-be heirs, the democratic socialists, that they were welcome to 'run as a separate party' - a phrase that in this business we recognize as the sound of a door being not so much closed as removed from its hinges and sold for scrap.…
…(cont) It was preceded in death by Senator Chuck Schumer's many compromises to maintain political power, a long illness the patient never really recovered from, each concession logged, filed, and cited approvingly by the trade press that covers these things the way sportswriters cover a losing streak - with a certain professional fondness for the numbers.
It is also survived, awkwardly, by Congressman Jim Clyburn, who this week backed expanding the Supreme Court to thirteen justices and, in the same breath, said he rued having once defended Clarence Thomas. That is not a contradiction so much as a timeline. A man can hold a position for decades and revise it in public, on the record, and that is called an obituary of a different kind - the kind where you get to write your own.
No formal cause of death has been given. Informally, around this office, we are calling it what it is: a shit sandwich of institutional math, where the coalition needed the base to show up, knock on doors, and turn out, and offered the base, in exchange, a firm handshake and instructions to wait outside.
This newspaper does not traffic in prediction, so we will not say whether the deceased comes back. Parties have surprised us before. This one has surprised us mostly by how consistent it has been.
He leaves behind a great deal of unfinished business, a base still waiting by the door, and no successor named. This whippersnapper of a coalition arrived promising something new and is being buried, on schedule, by the same hands that welcomed it in.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners register to vote in their own primary, and show up to it, whichever wing of the tent they are currently standing under.
“When the guy running the party's messaging tells the socialists to go start their own party, that's not a boundary, that's an eviction notice with better lighting. Watch where the energy that used to come from that flank goes next election - it doesn't disappear because Rahm said the word 'separate.'”
“Every big coalition needs boundaries, that's just organizational hygiene, and nobody's stopping anybody from starting a party - it's a free country, is the point I'd make if I worked for the DNC, which I don't, forget I said that.”
The receipts
Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) voiced his support for expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices and lamented his defense of Clarence Thomas during the conservative justice’s confirmation in 1991. In an appearance on NBC News’s Meet the Press…
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.