Word: chicago
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...snappy line, the kind of zinger McCain loved. But as with so many of his attack lines during the campaign, this one didn't resonate with voters. The jab was based on an outdated caricature of Chicago, and more than anything, it further underscored McCain's age. What he and fellow Republicans didn't (and probably still don't) understand is that being from Chicago is now an asset for a presidential candidate, not a liability...
Certainly there is no denying that the Windy City's storied political history is cartoonishly coarse and corrupt. The charge that in Chicago, residents "vote early and vote often," dates back to the election that followed the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Finger-pointing about who was to blame for the fire and its spread raised fears about electoral hanky-panky and led some voters to cast more than one ballot. In the early 20th century, a compromised police force and city administration allowed organized crime to thrive. Even the city's first commissioner of public welfare, a woman named...
...Chicago politics isn't for the faint of heart. In the 19th century, Chicago newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne famously remarked that "politics ain't beanbag," and that's still the town's reigning motto. Emanuel, a Chicago native, is a typically colorful figure, known for once mailing a rotting fish to a political opponent and for a post-election dinner in 1992 at which he repeatedly stabbed a steak knife into a table as he yelled out the names of those he considered President Bill Clinton's enemies...
...Daley family has ruled the city for the better part of a half-century. And while the current mayor is considered tamer than his father, who was accused of swinging the 1960 election for John F. Kennedy with the help of some Chicago voters who had already drawn their last breath, Richard M. Daley has been dogged by problems of his own. At least one of his aides has been convicted in a contract-scam case, and the city council is rarely scandal-free...
...problem with trying to taint Obama with the label of "Chicago politics" is that most Americans no longer make the association with corruption. "We're not looked at the same way we might have been years ago," says Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman and chair of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We're not Al Capone's city. We're not the stockyards of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle." These days Chicago is known for blending working-class kitsch - Da Bears and the Cubbies - with cosmopolitan shopping and restaurants on Michigan Avenue...