Who Will Fill the Shoes of Daley in Chicago?

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

Only those who aren’t native Chicagoans thought that Rahm Emanuel would not run for the office of mayor. “It’s a political dead end,” two of the most sophisticated, but non-native observers of Chicago politics that I know said to me over the din of the DJ’s ear-splitting music in the bar of W Chicago Lakeshore.

Like news, in America, most politics is local. In Chicago, all politics is local. And all politics is identity politics, the crudest kind of identity politics. The kind that makes Representative Loretta Sanchez’s race in California look like something aimed at the national interest.

The mayor’s office is a kingdom that dispenses enormous patronage and holds at bay the competing ethnic-anointed lords and their minions. Chicago’s mayors and even powerful aldermen have no aspiration for anything else.

Vito Marzullo, often inaccurately described as the last of the old machine bosses, ran the 25th Ward like a sovereign duchy out of the Holy Roman Empire. Approached to run for the U.S. Senate, Marzullo thought about it for a few days and then gave a response that only those who understand Chicago politics could appreciate. Marzullo concluded that a senator could dispense half a dozen or so jobs at most, while as alderman he controlled hundreds if not thousands of jobs. Marzullo thought the Chicago organization was trying to “screw” him by sending him to the Senate.