It’s time to bring back the Chicago Machine. Or the Democratic Machine. Or Machine Politics.

For those of you who are thinking, “the Chicago Machine has never left, so what’s to bring back?” you’re quite right. We’ve still got the Chicago Machine. But some time ago, use of the expression “Chicago Machine” fell out of favor.

But the continued omission of references to the Machine insults reality, disserves the reading public and permits the Machine to go its happy way as if it doesn’t exist. Maintaining this pretense has national implications, allowing Democratic presidential candidate and Chicago favorite son Barack Obama to continue the fiction that he ain’t no scion of no stinking Machine.

Maybe this denial of a Machine by omission was the result of the popular interpretations, that the victory of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor demolished the machine and handed the reins of government to the reformers. The assertion was, and is, laughable.

After Washington’s death, the Machine reference was resurrected principally by the late newspaper columnist Vernon Jarrett who continued—correctly, it turns out—to see Chicago politics as the practice of “them” versus “us,” with them being the Machine that swept the remnants of the Washington administration into obscurity.

Maybe the fall of the Machine usage is owed to the ascendancy of big money and “pin-stripped” patronage, which supposedly obsolesced old-style patronage: the jobs, driveway permits and various favors that came in return for political loyalty and work. The Machine’s final knifing supposedly came with the so-called Shakman decrees, which were agreements Chicago made in federal court to keep politics out of city hiring.

Even the reliable Encyclopedia of Chicago declared the machine’s demise: “The election of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor in 1983 and his subsequent reelection four years later unequivocally ended Democratic machine rule in Chicago. Nor did the election to the mayoralty of Richard M. Daley, the eldest son of the deceased boss, indicate a resurrection of the machine in a new guise. As the younger Daley readily acknowledged, radically different demographics and the attendant alterations in the political calculus clearly made the machine politics for which Chicago became famous an anachronism by the end of the twentieth century.”

And when someone in Wikipedia listed notable big city machine bosses, it noted Richard M.’s father, Richard J., but left out the son.

Ridiculous.

Only the naïve believed that Shakman changed the fundamental rules. The mention of three names should suffice to challenge the notion that things are different: Robert Sorich, Daley’s former patronage chief; Patrick Slattery, a former top official in the Department of Streets and Sanitation, and Timothy McCarthy, who toiled in the mayor’s office doing whatever. Their conviction for rigging hiring in the Daley administration recently was upheld by a federal appeals court.

The federally appointed “monitor” who assessed the city’s performance under the Shakman rules said in her 2007 annual report that the city “had been substantially non-complaint” prior to her 2005 appointment. In 2006, the city improved, but more recently the monitor had found that “although the Monitor has not uncovered the type of wholesale overt manipulation of interviews presented in the criminal trial of USA v. Sorich, et al., other, more subtle, types of manipulations of the hiring process have surfaced. Thus, whereas the City’s compliance had substantially increased during 2006, the same cannot be said for the City’s compliance in 2007.”

She’s being kind, I think. The city and its allies have more than enough patronage workers to handle any challenge, even to the point of sending some out to the suburbs to work against opponents of O’Hare Airport expansion. Such was the case a few years ago when the Machine sent workers into Park Ridge—a longtime hotbed of expansion opposition—to elect aldermen more sympathetic to the expansion. Same in Will County, where workers helped elect Daley-friendly Democrats to help stymie the long-planned south suburban airport as an alternative to O’Hare expansion.

If anything, the higher horsepower added to the Machine by the addition of high-octane contributions and cooperation pin-striped patronage hasn’t diminished the importance of the boots-on-the-ground old-style patronage. Like every well-designed and well-oiled machines, it has its sub-machines, servo motors and integral working parts. While they may be as identifiable as a fan belt, they nonetheless are a part of the Machine. I wouldn’t make the mistake of suggesting that there’s no Machine because of eruptions between Gov. Rod Blagojevich, House Speaker Michael Madigan and others who don’t get along so well with Daley. They all are where they are because of the Machine, and they all know it.

I’ve only been around and aware of politics since the first mayor Daley was elected, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the city in the grip of a Machine more than now. The voices of dissent in the City Council have been nearly obliterated, showing up only inconsistently, when aldermen get pressured, say, by organized labor to oppose a Wal-Mart. Now, the machine operates in concert and openly with specialized and even niche interests to get the Mayor’s way, such as the rubber stamping of the construction of the Children’s Museum in Grant Park. There was an example of how “civic leaders” and “business leaders” are integral parts of the machine.

If you aren’t comfortable with the idea of a monolithic Machine, with a single person—the mayor—at the controls, then perhaps you would be more interested believing it is a Machine that functions as an oligarchy. With the Cindy Pritzkers, the Patrick Ryans, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, contractors, developers, unions, real estate operators, banks, lawyers, corporate bosses, et al as much in bed with Daley’s Machine as 11th Ward precinct captains.

If Obama had come along 30 years ago, he might have been another Leon Despres, a combative, independent-minded and progressive alderman who joined other lakefront liberals in standing up for the good, true and beautiful. He might not ever have been elected outside of the ward to anything, much less U.S. senator or president. He would have been denied Machine support, and, like a plane without wings or a jet engine, he would have fallen fast and heavily to Earth. But he’s no Leon Despres or any of the other legendary do-gooders who would have vacationed on Lake Calumet before pledging allegiance, as Obama has, to the Machine.

There are few left today who truly fit the independent description, so thoroughly has the Machine permeated the city, suburbs and state. For Obama now to claim that he has risen to his glorified stature without at least the Machine’s approval, if not active participation, is preposterous. As if he did it all himself. When it comes to the Machine, Obama should acknowledge that some things are immutable.

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Dennis Byrne is a frequent contributor to the Chicago Daily Observer