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…
Page A2From§Eachthe milkman edition — 31 August 2026
Emanuel tells socialists to leave the tent; Schumer's many compromises keep his power.
As it ran on the front
Here's how the tent trick works, and it works every single time. First you build the tent big enough to hold everybody who might vote for you — the socialists, the union guys, the college kids who show up once every four years to save democracy. Then, the minute any of them ask the tent to actually do something, you find the flap and you point at it. Rahm Emanuel did the pointing out loud this week: run as a separate party. Not 'let's talk.' Not 'here's a seat at the table.' Get out and start your own tent, on your own dime, with your own ballot access, which in most states costs real money and takes years the establishment has and the socialists don't.
Meanwhile, over in the Senate, Chuck Schumer is getting profiled for something else entirely — his 'many compromises to maintain political power.' Read that phrase slow. Not compromises to pass a bill. Not compromises to help anybody. Compromises to maintain power. The power is the product. The bill is the packaging.…
…(cont) Put those next to each other and the con isn't complicated: the wing of the party that keeps asking for things — healthcare, wages, a floor under people — gets told to go build its own party from scratch. The wing that keeps trading things away gets to keep the office, the gavel, the fundraising list. That's not an accident of two unrelated news cycles landing on the same day. That's what the tent is for. It was never shelter. It was a fence with a door that only opens one way.
I've watched this movie enough times to know the ending. They'll say it's about electability, about not scaring the suburbs, about winning the seat back. And maybe some of that's even true. But watch what gets defended and what gets evicted, and you'll always find the same answer: whatever keeps the current furniture in the room stays, and whoever asks the furniture to move gets handed a map to the parking lot.
The socialists aren't losing an argument. They're losing a lease they never actually held.
“Notice nobody asked the socialists what they wanted before pointing at the flap — they just got told to go build their own tent, on their own money, while Schumer keeps trading pieces of his to keep the gavel. Same week, same tent, same door swinging one way.”
“Emanuel's right that a party needs discipline — you can't run on a platform if half the tent is drafting a different one, that's just message management. And Schumer's compromises keep Democrats relevant in a chamber they don't control, that's called legislating. I mean, it's called — okay, it's called keeping the majority leader's office, but that's still a strategy, not a — it's a strategy.”
The receipts
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…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.