Perhaps his failures are the result of concentrating on getting Obama elected president instead of taking care of business at home?

Richie Daley is in trouble. His popularity has sunk into the thirties and we maybe seeing the end of his era when he comes up for election in 2011. The Battle of Meigs Field in 2003 started it all, I think.

Meigs is right next to Soldier Field and was a general aviation airport. It was a busy, busy place and handy for Chicago. Maggie Daley, Mrs. Daley, wanted to turn it into a park, but it wasn't working out. Daley finally got pissed and in the middle of the night sent in bulldozers who tore up the runways stranding lots of airplanes. Chicago had to cough up some dough to settle all that with the feds.

The school system is half a billion in the hole and the city is several hundred million of the same.

Millennium Park is 300 million over budget. River Walk is 20 some million same.

CTA is so broke it can't buy new buses and the tracks are falling apart.

In 2006 Daley leased the Chicago Skyway, the road that connects the Dan Ryan (I-90) to Indiana to some foreignors for over a billion to fill the city coffers.

Now we see the great parking meter crisis. Daley leased the parking meters to Morgan Stanley in which his brother, Bill, is a wheel for a lot less than it was worth. Now if you park downtown, you gotta have a burlap bag filled with quarters to plug the meters. The parking penalties in Chicago are similar to being sent to Gitmo. Meter rates have quadrupled. People are outraged. This is the kind of deal that really riles Chicago voters, and is similar to the great snowplow debacle in early 1979 that toppled Mayor Bilandic.

The Olympic deal is a real black eye for Richie.

There is a laundry list of other problems that he has but I am getting writer's cramp.

What has this Outfit thug done for us, other than reward political boosters, eliminate much-needed jobs, tax actual taxpayers out of their homes, and spend nearly a billion dollars bribing the IOC so he can have his precious 2016 Summer Olympics, instead of using said funds to help economically-depressed residents?

Heck, he doesn't even believe in filling the numerous burgeoning potholes in our streets, especially if his limousine doesn't have to traverse down ANY of them!

The machine was revived after Washington's death and lives on.