Ever since Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced he wouldn't run for re-election, all eyes have been on Rahm Emanuel. And while the question of "will he run?" has finally been answered, one question still remains open: Can he?
A headline in Monday's Chicago Sun-Times would certainly make you wonder. "Experts say Rahm Emanuel not a legal resident of city," exclaims the title of Abdon Pallasch's story.
Mayoral candidates have to be residents of Chicago for at least a year before the election date. If the experts are right, Rahm wouldn't be eligible for the seat he's left the White House to seek.
But inquisitive minds might wonder: who exactly are these experts?
In fact, on reading the story, there's only one person who claims unequivocally that Emanuel isn't a legal resident, namely Burt Odelson. Odelson has been making the case against Rahm on many Chicago media outlets, and has garnered some national attention in so doing.
An impartial observer, though, he may not be. A Chicago attorney who specializes in election law, Odelson worked for George W. Bush during the Florida recount. More recently, as the Sun-Times dutifully points out, he's worked on gathering petition signatures for Sheriff Tom Dart and State Senator James Meeks, two likely opponents of Rahm's in the mayoral race.
Many less-partisan experts tell a different story.
From CBS:
"If you are a registered voter and continue to vote from your residence, you establish what we consider the intent to be a resident of the city of Chicago," Chicago Election Board Chairman Langdon Neal said.
From the AP:
Dawn Clark Netsch, a law professor and constitutional scholar who helped write the Illinois Constitution, said called residency "a matter of intent."
"If you register to vote and vote that's a pretty good sign of intent and therefore residency," Netsch said.
And from the self-same Sun-Times article:
"It's the sense of the election board that if you keep ownership of the property, keep your registration there, you've voted absentee, as far as we know he hasn't registered anywhere else, it's just like members of the military who serve overseas in Iraq -- we don't deny them the right to vote; people who take corporate assignments overseas, and lease out their home as a fact of life, it doesn't mean they've left permanently," Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Jim Allen said.
Rahm never sold his Chicago home and continued to vote from here, establishing his intent in a way that seems to satisfy electoral scholars and Board of Elections members.
So why has the residency question gained so much attention?
It could just be the machinations of a lawyer aligned with his opponents. Or it could be the frenzy of a media obsessed with Rahm's every move. But apart from all that, the issue may have stuck around because it touches on the real problem with Rahm's candidacy.
The biggest hurdle he'll have to overcome in his bid for Chicago mayor won't be proving to a judge that he's technically a resident. It'll be proving to the people that he actually is -- showing Chicagoans that his years in D.C. haven't put him out of touch with the very particular and very serious concerns of this city.
Still, this is Chicago. Expect an objection (from Odelson, possibly) as soon as Rahm's papers hit the Board of Elections' desk.