In the April issue of The Atlantic, Jonathan Alter writes about Rahm Emanuel’s efforts to clean up Chicago’s political system. Alter will be online to discuss the article today at 3:30 p.m.

An excerpt from Alter’s story:

I was walking around my sister’s Near North neighborhood in Chicago recently and came upon a small patch of green called Bauler Park. Paddy Bauler was the rollicking tavern owner and 43rd Ward alderman who in 1955 famously shouted, upon hearing of the election of Richard J. Daley as mayor: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!”

More than half a century later, the man who not long ago represented Bauler’s neighborhood in Congress insists that Chicago is finally ready. Rahm Emanuel, who succeeded old man Daley’s son Rich as mayor last May, has to be careful not to repudiate the Daleys, who helped nurture his rise. And “The Missile,” as the Chicago journalist James Warren dubbed him, is hardly a good-government “goo goo.” “Taking the politics out of politics is like taking the money out of capitalism,” Emanuel told me during his mayoral campaign. But in locking on to his three high-value targets—the city’s tattered finances, a murder rate twice that of New York, and schools that aren’t preparing Chicago’s future workforce—Rahm (as he’s known everywhere) is bent on wholesale reform of “the Chicago Way.”

Ever since the film The Untouchables popularized the term, there’s been some misunderstanding about what the Chicago Way means. In the movie, Sean Connery’s Irish cop describes to Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness how to get Al Capone: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago Way!” And that will be Rahm’s way, at least some of the time. But in practice, this vague urban modus operandi is less about vengeance than venality—payoffs, kickbacks, and ghost-hiring, not to mention the destructive if perfectly legal tradition of cozy union contracts and the newer “pinstripe patronage” of sketchy bond deals and privatized city functions. […]

Rahm quotes an iconic Chicago line to make his point on reform: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” His aim, he says, is to build a Chicago where everybody is a somebody, even if nobody sent ’em. The mayor’s office says that it has recorded more than 6.4 million total visits to the city’s new Web site, which, among other new transparency measures, posts all government salaries. During the debate over last year’s budget, more than 40,000 Chicagoans commented online about where to make cuts. Paddy Bauler is cursing Twitter from the grave.

“We are known as ‘the city that works,’” Rahm says. “You gotta make sure it works for everybody and not just a few.” He insists that the deeply entrenched system is already beginning to change: “One mother having difficulty with CPS [Chicago Public Schools] posts something on Facebook about schools. She got called that day by CPS. When the fuck did that ever happen around here? Another person tweeted about a pothole on her street and the Chicago Department of Transportation was at the pothole the next day, filling it!”

Sitting in his cavernous office on the fifth floor of City Hall, Rahm lowers his outstretched, empty palms, then raises them above his waist. “If you have your hands above the table, you can’t deal from the bottom of the deck,” he says.

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