Remember when both political parties weren’t all that far from the center?

As recently as the Reagan years, most of the Democratic Party was liberal, but they weren’t literally bat-guano crazy. I remember Democrats like New York’s Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; he was a liberal, but he wasn’t crazy, and while I seldom agreed with him, he was intelligent and drew a certain amount of respect.

Most Democrats of that stripe have been kicked to the curb by the Democrat Party in favor of the “Squad” and looney-tunes progressives. “Woke” for the last few election cycles, outside of the major Democrat-controlled cities, has become a synonym for “losing elections.”

Then, there’s Chicago, where the electorate replaced the walking disaster, Mayor Lightfoot, with an even bigger disaster, Mayor Brandon Johnson. For the Clinton administration creature and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, that is a bridge too far. He said as much to Bill Maher on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” show on Friday night.

Emanuel said on Friday night that government has allowed the city to become too “permissive” on crime and has fixated on niche liberal issues like transgender bathroom policies rather than dealing with plummeting education standards.

“I don’t want to hear another word about the locker room, I don’t want to hear another word about the bathroom. You better start focusing on the classroom,” Emanuel told the “Real Time” panel, featuring host Bill Maher and liberal pundit Fareed Zakaria.

Maher, who often shreds the excesses of the woke left on his program, wondered, “I read that the current mayor of Chicago has an approval rating of 6.6 percent…. What’s going on in Chicago?”

“Round it up. 7,” the ex-mayor and former U.S. ambassador to Japan joked, though he went into some serious criticism of the city’s government. He began by noting his own mantra back when he ran the city, telling Maher, “Safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things and your city’s going to be fine.”

Watch:

Bill Maher asks Rahm Emanuel why Chicago’s mayor has such a low approval rating, and the panel agrees that Democrat policies have ruined large American cities:
Bill Maher: “I read that the current mayor of Chicago has an approval rating of 6.6%. What’s going on in Chicago?”
Rahm… pic.twitter.com/Wn3rj5kQ9v

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 1, 2025

I never thought I’d be writing these words, but… Rahm Emanuel is right.