I don't know much about Richard Daley, mayor or Chicago, or the political machine that makes up that city's governing system. But I did enjoy two quotes in Joseph Epstein's opinion column in today's WSJ centered around the Daley dynasty in Chicago:

In his novel "LIfe and Fate," the Russian writer Vasily Grossman notes: "Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from bring strangled by weeks, he must keep his broom, spade, and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he things about somethign else for a year or two, then everything's lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread adn everything is buried under dust and snow."

The great administrators-and Richard Daley, I believe, qualifies here-are those men and women who have no desire to be elsewhere: The best academic deans do not dream of being president of Harvard, the best husbands do not dream of sleeping with Nicole Kidman, the best mayors do not dream of going on to the Senate and up the greasy pole from there. They are anchored, happy in their work, committed to the job at hand in perpetuity.