Chuck Schumer’s modest leadership

AS A SELF-DESCRIBED “angry centrist”, Chuck Schumer used to relish fighting his party’s radical fringe. In a centre-left manifesto he published in 2007, entitled “Positively American”, the Senate majority leader shuddered to remember the left-wing activists he had encountered at Harvard in the 1960s who “seemed to want to tear down every part of the American system”. He was even more contemptuous of his party’s unwillingness to repudiate them. “In politics, you have to either defend or denounce what your friends say,” wrote Mr Schumer. “If you don’t, people start to wonder what you really believe.”