The Latest Rahm-Ism

The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is famous for observing, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." His latest highly quotable aphorism, according to those who are repeating it, is "Capitalism is too important to be left to the capitalists," a take-off on Clemenceau's statement that "war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men," or, more colloquially, "war is too important to be left to the generals." It's a witty and perhaps slightly disarming formulation, but it might leave you wondering whether, under that formulation, government officials who believe in capitalism still count as capitalists. This is the same Mr. Emanuel who made $16.2 million in his two-and-a-half year stint as managing director in the Chicago office of Wasserstein and Perella.