Obama's political values rooted in Chicago's Daly machne: "Who gets what, when and how?"

"If you want to understand the political agenda of Barack Obama, forget Alinsky, stop calling Obama a "socialist," and start thinking of Barack Obama as a guy who received his political baptism, not from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but from the Chicago machine.

Chicago politics is not about ideology. It is about, "Who Gets What, When, and How," to quote the inimitable Harold D. Laswell, one of the outstanding political theorists of the last century.

The sine qua non of Chicago politics is power, getting it and keeping it. Everything else is incidental. Even corruption is a byproduct of power and is functional only if it enables you to stay in power.

In Chicago politics, you don't make waves, you don't back losers, and you "don't talk to nobody nobody sent." Chicago politics is always about hierarchy and centralization.

Chicago politics is also parochial. In the City of Neighborhoods, ethnic consciousness is strong. An Irish machine, for years, ran a Polish city by making sure that the Poles got a big piece of the pie. There is seldom a perception of a common good. There is the amalgamation of different ethnic interests. In Chicago, the whole is clearly the sum of its parts, and the lubricants for the parts are political spoils.

If you want to understand Obama's health care policy, you need to start where Obama starts. You need to start with Chicago. You need to look at constituent interests."

(snip)

"...building a new power base resulting from the mobilization of the political and economic periphery requires redefining the nation's health problems as the nation's health catastrophe.

Health reform is Chicago politics on a national level. Welcome to the city."