Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s tough-talking mayor who was elected to a second term just last spring, is facing a snowballing political crisis that now threatens to derail his mayoralty. The Wall Street Journal reports on the way a series of high-profile police shootings have rattled Chicago politics and undercut the Democrat’s standing with Chicago’s leftwing activists, and, increasingly, with the city as a whole:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel cut short a holiday break in Cuba amid a wave of criticism at home that isn’t letting up more than a month after the release of a video showing a Chicago police officer shooting and killing a black teenager.

The mayor’s decision to return early, his administration said, came partly in the wake of a police shooting over the weekend that claimed the lives of two people — prompting calls for the city to improve how it responds to calls involving mentally ill people.

Mr. Emanuel was already dealing with fallout from footage of Laquan McDonald being shot and killed in October 2014 that has left the mayor’s approval rating in the teens in a recent poll. Protests calling for his resignation have become commonplace.

But this is much more than a story about a politician’s career struggles. What’s happening in Chicago is an earthquake that points to the escalating crisis of governability for blue cities across the United States. There are at least six dimensions to this crisis.

Read the article “Why Democrat Cities Are Failing” on the-american-interest.com.