I’m acquainted with Rahm Emanuel at least to the extent of having once ridden up the elevator in the Thompson Center and chatted with him. That brief encounter, combined with watching his career as a political consultant, chief of staff to Bill Clinton, congressman, mayor of Chicago, and ambassador to Japan, leaves me with a consistent impression: he is intensely focused, relentlessly transactional, and unusually effective. In other words, a formidable political actor and, in my view, someone who would likely make a capable president.

At Politico, Adam Wren argues that Democrats have a “Rahm Emanuel problem,” describing both his style and the challenge he would pose to a party that has drifted leftward, particularly on social issues. The implication is that Emanuel could force a reckoning, that his candidacy would be a kind of “rolling Sister Souljah moment for the party”.

I think that’s right as far as it goes. But I also think it misses the more important point: Rahm Emanuel is very unlikely ever to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Not because he lacks ability. Quite the opposite. He is arguably too well-suited to an earlier version of the Democratic Party.

The problem is coalition mismatch.

Start with generation. Four of the last five presidents have been Baby Boomers; Joe Biden is Silent Generation. Rahm Emanuel is a Boomer. It is tempting to treat Biden’s election as evidence that Democratic voters are comfortable with candidates of that age. I don’t think that’s right.

Democrats had already rejected Biden twice in presidential primaries. In 2020 he was not the natural expression of voter preference so much as the beneficiary of a very specific and unlikely confluence of events: the pandemic, a fragmented field, a consolidation of party elites, and a widespread sense of urgency about defeating Donald Trump. It was, in that sense, a panic nomination. And it worked. But that does not mean it revealed a durable preference for older candidates. If anything, it looks more like an exception that proves the rule.

Since then, the pressure for generational turnover inside the Democratic coalition has only intensified, not diminished.

But generation is only part of the story.

More important is the growing gap between Emanuel’s profile and the priorities of the Democratic primary electorate. He is combative, pragmatic, and institutionally oriented. He believes in bargaining, in trade-offs, in incremental gains extracted through leverage. That is a political style that fits comfortably within the party as it existed from the 1990s through roughly the Obama years.

It is a less comfortable fit today.

Consider one concrete example: Israel. Emanuel’s connection is not merely rhetorical; he has deep personal and political ties, including time spent as a civilian volunteer with the Israeli Defense Forces. A decade ago that would have been unremarkable within Democratic politics. Today it is not.

The Democratic coalition has changed. Younger voters, activists, and key parts of the party’s intellectual infrastructure have moved in a markedly different direction on Israel. You don’t have to take a position on that shift to observe that it exists and that it has consequences in a primary election where activists and highly engaged voters play an outsized role. Emanuel’s stance is not just a difference of emphasis; it is, for many of those voters, disqualifying.

That same pattern shows up more broadly. Emanuel is male, white, and 60-something. None of those characteristics is disqualifying in isolation. But taken together, they place him out of phase with a coalition that is increasingly diverse, increasingly younger, and increasingly attentive to representation as well as policy.

Put differently: the issue is not that Democratic voters consciously reject candidates who look like Rahm Emanuel. It’s that, when given a choice, they are now consistently drawn to candidates who do not.

There is, of course, a counterargument. Emanuel’s supporters would say that his very willingness to challenge the party’s left flank—his “pugilism,” as Wren puts it—is precisely what makes him attractive. In a general election environment shaped by polarization and conflict, a candidate who can fight, bargain, and govern might be exactly what Democrats need.

That argument shouldn’t be dismissed. It may even be right in a general election context.

But it runs into a more immediate constraint: getting through the primary.

And the Democratic primary electorate, as it is presently constituted, is unlikely to reward a candidate whose profile, priorities, and instincts are so visibly out of alignment with its center of gravity.

So I find myself in an odd position. I think Rahm Emanuel would probably be a good president. I might well vote for him.

I just don’t think Democratic primary voters ever will.

Of all of the Democrats who are running for their party’s nomination for president or appear to be running the one I favor most at present is New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. This post at The Hill by Alexander Bolton provides a good explanation for what that is:

Asked by NBC anchor Kristen Welker whether Democrats are making a mistake of shrinking their coalition with purity tests, Booker responded that his party “has failed this moment.”

“I’m proud of so many things that my Democratic colleagues are doing. But as a whole, our party has failed this moment. It’s why I’ve called for new leadership in America,” he said, going on to argue that party leaders have gotten too mired in partisan fighting.

“I’ve called for generational renewal because this left/right divide is killing our country. And our adversaries know it. They come onto our social media and try to whip up hate in America. That is one of our biggest crises,” he said.

That’s similar to the reason I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. This echoes the rationale that led me to support Barack Obama in 2008. In that case, however, the bipartisan tone of the campaign did not survive contact with governing—whether due to political constraints, party incentives, or presidential choice.

Booker’s case differs in at least one important respect. He brings a broader governing background, having served both as a mayor, an executive role requiring practical coalition-building, and as a U.S. senator. More importantly, he has sustained this message for over a decade rather than adopting it solely in a presidential campaign.

The relevant question, therefore, is not whether Booker can articulate a bipartisan vision but whether he can maintain it under the structural pressures that have pushed recent presidents toward partisanship. His record suggests a greater likelihood than we have seen in recent cycles, though those pressures remain formidable.

Whether a President Booker could sustain such an approach remains uncertain but it is, in my view, a more plausible prospect than it has been in roughly twenty years.

Poli sci professor Jennifer Murtazashvili in a Washington Post op-ed notes how divergent the narratives about the American and Israeli war against Iran are from her lived experience in Tel Aviv:

Something strange is in the air. I wake up every morning in Tel Aviv having survived another day. Sirens go off in the middle of the night; we go back to bed countless times. We wake to news that the Iron Dome intercepted the vast majority — 92 percent by official counts — of incoming rockets.

Here’s her observation about the sharp divergence between narratives and her experience:

We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe.

She is implicitly treating her lived experience as ground truth but lived experience is itself a narrow and filtered signal stream. Whether it’s actually objective, falsifiable reality is itself the problem she’s calling out.

To some degree what she’s observing has always been the case. Clausewitz wrote about the “fog of war”. Governments have always produced propaganda. Audiences have always necessarily filtered the accounts they hear through their own experience and priors. Today there is an important difference that I don’t believe Dr. Murtazashvili recognizes, at least not explicitly. The difference is not the existence of fog but its source: not too little information but too much of the wrong kind.

I would offer her this. Information is signal minus noise. The cost of producing signal has been reduced to near zero. Today there is an overwhelmingly large amount of signal and an even more daunting amount of noise. The lack of actual information is something I have complained about. The problem is not merely that people construct alternate realities, but that the ratio of noise to signal has become so unfavorable that doing otherwise is extraordinarily difficult.

After some discussion of the worried emails she receives on a daily basis from friends, family, and colleagues, she provides her analysis:

What worries me more than the fake videos are the people who cannot fathom that this war is going well for the United States, for Israel and maybe even for the long-suffering people of Iran. The strategic picture is more favorable than the online narrative suggests. Iranian options are narrowing to outcomes that all leave Israel better positioned than before, whether that is regime change in Tehran, a negotiated arrangement under American pressure or a ceasefire along the lines of the Houthi deal.

and concludes:

This is the defining feature of the alt-war. It is not that people lack information, but that the success of the war conflicts with their priors and so they have constructed an alternative war: one in which Tel Aviv is burning, Washington never heard of the Strait of Hormuz before last week and the whole enterprise is doomed. Because that is the only version they can psychologically accept.

I think there’s (at least) one additional source of what I would call “noise”: the Trump Administration. That narrative varies on a day-to-day basis, so wildly that identifying the information it contains becomes increasingly difficult. When official narratives are unstable, they themselves become a major source of noise, because they destroy the reliability of one of the few high-bandwidth signal channels available during wartime.

Meanwhile, I continue to try to separate signal from noise in an environment where both the volume of noise and the instability of primary sources are unusually high..

I had to mull this Washington Post editorial over for a while before I recognized what the actual question being raised was. The editorial opens with a condemnation of equity in an Australian mining company owned by the federal government:

The United States government became the second-largest shareholder in an Australian mining company last week. If there’s a compelling case to gamble taxpayer money like this, the Trump administration hasn’t made it.

and continues with an explanation of it:

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation announced plans Wednesday to convert a $31 million loan to Syrah Resources, which operates a graphite mine in Mozambique, into a 20 percent equity stake. The move is an attempt to counter China’s control of the world’s supply of graphite, which is essential for rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles and energy storage systems for the U.S. grid.

and a bit later notes that the federal government has equity stakes in a number of other foreign concerns:

The administration has already used taxpayer dollars to buy equity stakes in other critical mineral companies, such as Trilogy Metals, Lithium Americas, MP Materials, Vulcan Elements, Korea Zinc and USA Rare Earth. It’s also entered into an agreement to take a 10 percent stake in Intel, the chip manufacturer, and secured a “golden share” of U.S. Steel while negotiating the acquisition of that company by Japan’s Nippon.

before making the following recommendation:

There may be a case for limited government intervention to guarantee the supply of certain inputs into products crucial for national security. But a better way to ensure that happens is reducing trade barriers with allies rather than allowing bureaucrats to bet on which firms might be successful.

They never address the underlying questions: should the federal Development Finance Corporation (DFC) exist at all and, if so, what should it do?

The DFC was created as part of the 2018 BUILD Act which had broad bipartisan support. It makes loans to foreign corporations and takes equity stakes in them, ostensibly for national security reasons. Both loans to foreign corporations and equity stakes taken by it are treated as subsidy costs without consideration of possible future earnings.

I understand the editors’ concerns. They accept the goal of secure supply chains. They would prefer trade liberalization over government investment. They never come to terms with whether that’s actually feasible under present geopolitical constraints.

Gold is where you find it—we can’t control where the materials we need will originate from. And, yes, private companies can take equity stakes in overseas companies but will they? CEOs evaluate investments based on cost, risk, and return. Must the federal government guarantee those investments in some way? Should the federal government be in the business of guaranteeing private investments?

Trade with allies does not change the geographic concentration of minerals, China’s dominance of some strategic commodities, or reduce the risks that political instability in some of the places that produce strategic materials introduces. Are the editors concerned about the risks involved or how the DFC’s investments are scored?

I have mixed feelings about all of this. I think we should maintain low tariffs with Canada and Mexico and encourage U. S. companies to invest in Canadian and Mexican companies. I’m not as confident about concerns in countries that are separated from the U. S. by 10,000 miles of ocean. Many but not all of the strategically sensitive materials we’re trying to secure with the DFC we continue to have in considerable amounts but block companies from producing with environmental and other federal regulations. Liberalizing or eliminating those would go far to solve the problem the DFC was intended to.

I wanted to make one remark about Noah Smith’s recent observation on AI’s “sales pitch”:

“Hi. Do you have a moment? I’m from the Cursed Microwave company. Our product is much better than a traditional microwave. Not only can it automatically and perfectly cook all your food, it also microwaves your whole body, so you and your family are paralyzed and unable to ever work again. Don’t worry, though, because when everyone has a Cursed Microwave, our society will probably implement Universal Basic Income, and you and your children can just go on welfare! Oh, by the way, we estimate that there’s a 2 to 25 percent chance that our microwaves will put out so much radiation that they destroy the entire human race.”

If a door-to-door salesman gave me this pitch, I would gently see him out the door, and then quickly call the FBI.

Quite to the contrary, it’s a great sales pitch if you define “great” as one that converts paying customers. But neither Mr. Smith nor ordinary people are the intended audience.

It’s a compelling pitch to short-horizon, competition-constrained decision-makers even if the long-term equilibrium is unclear or unstable. Phrasing it more kindly the pitch is:

Using AI you can accomplish the same results you are now with fewer employees. We can improve your bottom line.

It’s perfect when you identify its audience correctly.

Last night my wife and I saw Gabriela Lena Frank’s 2022 opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego at Lyric Opera, our last opera of the 2025-2026 season. We were drenched by the sudden downpour in downtown Chicago during the walk from our parking garage to Lyric’s home at Civic Opera House.

The picture above gives you a good idea of what the opera looked like. The production design drew heavily from the works of both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. I thought the concept and book were great, the production good, and the staging a throwback to the way operas were staged 50 years ago with the performers standing in lines across the stage and singing to the audience. Some of that may have been deliberate.

I found the music unengaging. In a sort of revival of opera seria it was cerebral and static, maintaining a slow, stately andante and similar vocal and orchestral densities throughout. The final scene, which should have been an emotional highpoint, maintained the same, detached tone.

My wife asked a good question: “Is this magical realism?” I think it sat right on the boundary of both, leaning more into fantasy. In magical realism the supernatural is ordinary and expected. In fantasy it is more extraordinary and used as a sort of intellectual device.

All in all it was a decent conclusion to the season but won’t become one of my favorite operas.

Kyle MacMillan, Chicago Sun-Times

Bringing together piano, celeste, gongs and myriad other percussion with traditional orchestral instruments, Frank draws forth a rich palette of sometimes hard-to-identify, discordant sounds. The music can be spooky and foreboding with rumbling marimba runs, shrill piccolo blasts and alien-sounding trumpet lines or moving and reflective with gently cascading harp or searching clarinet.

Intrinsic to this opera is the first-rate Lyric Opera Chorus, which is almost a constant presence, either seen on stage or heard offstage, helping to shape the opera’s reverential, almost sacred feel at times. Sometimes these singers are part of the action as cemeterygoers or underworld denizens, but other times they act as a kind of Greek chorus, prodding or commenting on all that is happening.

Hannah Edgar, Chicago Tribune

This review is more about the revival of interest in Frida Kahlo than it is about the opera itself.

Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Music Review

El último sueño de Frida y Diego has much going for it: Frank’s compelling score, a strong cast, and a striking, at times visually stunning production. All elements came together Saturday to create a vivid, colorful and impressive night of theater.

Frank’s flowing, restless music is powerful, often haunting and eminently listenable. Even when the stage action was static or dragged, the crystalline timbres and iridescent scoring coming out of the pit consistently beguiled the ear.

And yet, paradoxically, engaging as Frank’s music is, there is little that sticks in the memory (an issue I’ve also had with Frank’s orchestral music). More crucially—and Cruz’s libretto bears some blame for this—there are no true musical peaks or standout solo moments for the singers. Yes, there are solos and a late quasi-duet for Frida and Diego. But they appear and go quickly in an efficiently scrolling theatrical canvas that doesn’t pause long enough for the singing to make a strong impact. At times Frida y Diego feels less like an opera than a Nilo Cruz play with intriguing incidental music.

Once again, Mr. Johnson clearly saw the same opera I did.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has proposed capping Social Security retirement benefits at $100,000:

This Trust Fund Solutions Initiative white paper offers a new option to improve Social Security solvency by establishing a maximum benefit level.

The Six Figure Limit (SFL) would set a $100,000 cap on the total benefit a couple retiring at the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) can receive starting this year. The SFL would be adjusted based on marital status and claiming age, with a $50,000 limit for a single retiree collecting at the NRA.

I wonder if they recognize what a “poisoned pill” such a reform would be for Democrats? Clearly, some Democrats do. Connecticut Rep. John Larson:

“Nobody’s getting wealthy on Social Security,” Larson said in a recent interview with CNBC, noting that more than 5 million Americans receive monthly benefit checks that are below the federal poverty level.

“It is the very sustenance that 40% of all Americans need just to get by, and it hasn’t been adjusted in more than 50 years,” Larson said.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren:

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and member of the Senate Finance Committee, published an op-ed in Fox News hitting back at the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s attempts to gut the Social Security Administration (SSA) as a means of slashing benefits for Social Security recipients.

A key problem that goes quietly unmentioned: how can Democrats coherently support a $100,000 cap on annual Social Security benefits without also supporting a $100,000 cap on defined benefit pensions for those who don’t participate in the Social Security system, e.g. teachers?

I don’t oppose the reform in principle but even the CRFB acknowledges it won’t solve much of Social Security’s problems. As I’ve pointed out before the real problem staring us in the face is assumption failure—the 1983 reform didn’t foresee the sharp increase in income inequality that took place in the 1980s to the present day. My proposed solution was to make all wage income subject to Social Security withholding.

What do the midterm elections portend? Should we be prepared for a Democratic sweep? A Republican? Are big changes ahead or more of the same?

In his most recent Wall Street Journal op-ed Karl Rove analyzes the prospects for Democrats in the upcoming midterms. After noting that midterm elections tend to incline towards referenda on the sitting president and pointing out that Trump’s favorability isn’t particularly high, he points out something interesting, even paradoxical:

But Mr. Trump’s popularity isn’t the only consequential number. The RCP average has the Democratic Party at 35.8% favorable to 55.7% unfavorable. The Republican Party does better, 39.3% to 53.9%. How did the Democrats become less popular than Mr. Trump? It took many years, much hard work, wacky policy stances and plenty of missteps.

Even the RCP’s generic House ballot is a problem for the Democratic Party’s midterm prospects. Although Democrats lead Republicans, 46.9% to 42.1%, that may point to only modest Democratic gains in the House. Only a handful of districts are up for grabs this fall. Prognosticators suggest there are 17 districts that are toss-ups. Thirteen are held by Republicans, four by Democrats. On top of these are 13 seats held by Democrats and two held by Republicans that lean blue and one Democratic and three Republican seats that lean red. Finally, there are two GOP seats and one held by an independent (former Republican Kevin Kiley) that are considered solidly Democratic after recent resdistricting shenanigans.

Altogether, that isn’t a lot of targets for Democrats. If they swept all 39 at-risk seats, that would translate into a gain of 21. That’s about half the 41-seat boost they saw in 2018, when their generic-ballot advantage before the election was 7.3 points.

concluding that Democrats are acting as though trashing Trump is all they need to do. The tone of Mr. Rove’s op-ed is hortatory: he wants Republicans to get off their duffs and do something. His warning reflects the reality that even favorable structural conditions can be squandered.

The paradox to which Mr. Rove gestures isn’t particularly surprising. Indeed, it’s close to the modern norm, following the patterns of George W. Bush and the Republicans in 2006 and Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2014. Presidential approval ratings are personal rather than reflecting on their respective parties.

This also aligns with Ruy Teixeira’s recent lament about the Democratic Party’s declining standing with voters. The problem he identifies is not primarily candidate-specific but structural: the party brand itself has weakened. The polling Rove cites with Trump trailing generic Republicans, and Democrats trailing both fits that pattern. Democrats may benefit from dissatisfaction with Trump without having rebuilt broad confidence in their own party.

Larry Sabato projects the likely outcome of the 2026 midterms is that Democrats will gain control of the House by 21 seats while Republicans retain control of the Senate. That is also supported by prediction markets.

What does that mean for the next two years? If precedent is any gauge, it will mean continued gridlock and posturing by both political parties. Divided government without a strong mandate typically produces symbolic conflict rather than durable policy. If House Democrats remain true to form they will impeach Trump (again) and it will go nowhere (again). If Senate Republicans remain true to form they won’t accomplish a great deal.

John Halpin has just announced that he’s shuttering the Liberal Patriot Substack:

We tried our best to make a non-profit media model work with entirely free analysis and commentary published throughout our existence. But it turns out upsetting the partisan applecart on multiple issues is not a particularly good fundraising or business model.

He’s late to the party. I reached that conclusion more than 20 years ago.

Ruy Teixeira’s valedictory post there is a sort of lament for the Democratic Party. In it he reviews the folly of viewing what are called “trans rights” through a civil rights prism as part of the ongoing liberal project of defending and expanding personal rights.

He also proposes ten qualities of what he sees as a “realistic immigration policy”, eventually arriving at the observation that what the Democrats are presently supporting is a de facto open borders policy:

Going forward, Democrats must show voters they understand these realities and are willing to dramatically change the incentive structure for illegal and irregular immigration. That means strict border enforcement, elimination or radical restriction of immigration loopholes, and a credible interior enforcement regime that recognizes illegal immigrants, even if they stay out of trouble, are still illegal and therefore susceptible to deportation. Otherwise illegal immigrants who manage to enter the country will quite reasonably assume that they can stay here forever which of course is a massive incentive for more illegal immigration.

He also wishes that Democrats had some sort of coherent economic policy beyond opposing Trump or vague generalities like “affordability” or “abundance”. He concludes:

It’s time—past time—for Democrats to discard the conceit that they are on the right side of history and that therefore their positions are, and have been, noble and correct. Until they do so, I do not expect them to develop the dominant majority coalition they seek and vanquish right populism. Indeed, it could be the other way around. That’s a sobering thought.

I’ll miss Liberal Patriot. It was a pro-Democratic site with which I was frequently in agreement. I doubt we’ve heard the last of the John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, or the other contributors there.