Part of this is her nature. Just like her two-decade climb up the Democratic ranks, Pelosi’s two years as House speaker have been marked by a style that might best be described as justifiably paranoid. She has relied on a close and tight-lipped circle of loyalists, frozen out those who have crossed her, and made examples of those who have threatened her hegemony. It may sound ugly, but this is how you survive in the U.S. House, especially when you’ve risen higher than any woman in history.

But there’s something else going on, too: For all of her success in consolidating power within the House, one man has eluded her grasp these past few years – and he’s about to be the second-most powerful man in the White House.

That would be Rahm Emanuel, who has given up his Illinois Congressional seat to become Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Pelosi and Emanuel aren’t exactly enemies, but there’s not much trust between them and there’s plenty of reason for the speaker to be apprehensive about what he might do with his new power. After all, he’s the only Democrat in the House since she became the party’s leader to show the ability to outmaneuver Pelosi.

Emanuel arrived in the House after the 2002 midterm elections, when – after making tens of millions of dollars in an 18-month stint as an investment banker – he claimed a Chicago-based district that had been specially preserved for him during redistricting by order of Richard Daley, the Second City’s mayor. Weeks later, Pelosi’s ascent to the top of the House Democratic Caucus was made official when she defeated nominal opposition to replace the departing Dick Gephardt as minority leader. (The real race had been the year before, when a long-standing battle with Steny Hoyer had culminated in Pelosi’s election as minority whip, which put her in line to succeed Gephardt the following year.)

Pelosi was rapidly consolidating her power within the caucus, packing influential committees with her loyalists and marginalizing Hoyer and his backers. She leaned on several longtime friends and allies, many of them fellow Californians (like George Miller and Anna Eshoo) to craft strategy with her and to act as her enforcers. Also part of her inner circle was John Murtha, a socially conservative Pennsylvanian and old school wheeler-dealer who made for an unlikely Pelosi lieutenant. But Murtha had long-standing enmity for Hoyer and had teamed up with Pelosi during their leadership fight.

When key positions came open, Pelosi made sure they were filled by nonthreatening loyalists – preferably older members who lacked obvious ambition. For instance, when the No. 4 leadership spot came open in 2005, Pelosi and Murtha cracked the whip behind the scenes to line up votes for 58-year-old John Larson, a friendly but nondescript Connecticut Democrat who possessed neither the ruthless cunning nor the backlog of IOU’s to build his own power base within the leadership. He won the race, beating a Hoyer ally, New York’s Joe Crowley, and a woman who mistakenly thought she had Pelosi’s backing, Illinois’ Jan Schakowsky. Pelosi liked Schakowsky enough, but Larson was the perfect cipher.

This is the atmosphere that Emanuel, a cutthroat political strategist with an army of influential supporters and dreams of claiming the speaker’s gavel someday, stepped into when he arrived in the House in 2003. Cozying up to Pelosi would be pointless, he quickly realized; she already had her favorites and knew too much about his ambition. Plus, it wasn’t exactly his style.

If he wanted real power in the House, and if he wanted to establish a clear avenue to a leadership spot, Emanuel would have to go around Pelosi – something no one had succeeded in doing since she’d become the Democratic leader.

At first, he was shot down, denied the seat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee that he sought as a freshman. It’s highly unusual for a first-termer to win a Ways and Means seat, but Emanuel, a onetime top aide to Bill Clinton who was backed behind the scenes by some of the party’s most influential national donors, was not a typical freshman. Still, Pelosi knew that giving him the slot as a freshman would anoint Emanuel as a member to watch, hastening his rise in the House. So he was told no.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Two years later, Pelosi was in the market for a new chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. For the 2004 cycle, she had awarded the post – in typical Pelosi fashion – to a mild-mannered California loyalist, 63-year-old Bob Matsui. Matsui, who passed away from a rare stem cell disorder two months after the election, had been a disaster, overseeing a poorly funded campaign effort that produced a loss of two seats.

Matsui, before his death, swore off a second term. Immediately, top national Democrats began pushing Emanuel for the post, awed by his unmatched fund-raising prowess and smart and aggressive tactical sensibilities. For his part, Emanuel badly wanted the job; the power to dole out campaign cash would allow him to build his own power base within the House, and the goodwill generated by a successful stint could give him an opening to jump into the leadership. But he didn’t want to beg Pelosi for it (that might require him to make concessions to her) and, if he got the job, he didn’t want her looking over his shoulder every step of that way.

Pelosi knew what the job could mean for Emanuel, too, and was initially unwilling to offer it to him. Emanuel feigned indifference, telling reporters he had family responsibilities and might be better off without the hassle of running the DCCC. But it was a bargaining tactic. All the while, support for Emanuel, spurred on by his well-heeled allies and top party figures in Washington, grew. Hungry to reclaim the House, Democrats began clamoring for his selection. Pelosi floated the names of several other possible candidates in the press, but Democrats (correctly) saw them as much more like Matsui than Emanuel.

Finally, the pressure became too much for Pelosi, and she was forced to go to Emanuel. But now he held all the cards – and he knew it. Democrats believed he was by far the best candidate for the job and he was still pretending he didn’t really want it. So Pelosi, to mollify her members, was forced to sweeten the pot. When the deal was finally struck, Emanuel agreed to head up the DCCC, but he was also given an unusual guarantee of independence by Pelosi – and a Ways and Means seat. Pelosi had been outfoxed.

On Emanuel’s watch, the Democrats did take back the House in 2006, and he was rewarded with the No. 4 spot – caucus chairman – on the majority side. (He had actually aimed a slot higher, but was forced to back down to avoid an ugly fight with the Congressional Black Caucus, which would have bristled at any Emanuel effort to leapfrog James Clyburn.) When he left Congress this month, Emanuel was the youngest member of the Democratic leadership, by far. He had created his own formidable power base and the speaker’s gavel, while still firmly in Pelosi’s hand, wasn’t far from his reach.

This week, Pelosi may have let her apprehension about Emanuel’s new position show, with the appearance of a Politico story” that read very much like a purpose-pitch from her office. The gist of the piece: Pelosi wants the Obama White House to know that she, and only she, runs the House, and that if they want to say or do anything with any House members, they’d better go through her first.

One sentence in the story stands out. “In large part,” it reads, “Emanuel owed his rise to Pelosi, who put him in charge of the DCCC, where he helped lead the Democrats back to the House majority after 12 years out of power.”

Pelosi may wish Emanuel remembers his House years that way, but both he and she know better – and it’s making her a little uncomfortable.

He consolidated all of the city’s customer service numbers into 311, centralized the school system and came up with a plan for New Yorkers to breathe the cleanest air of any big city by the year 2030.

The true inventor of these policies, though, was not the Jewish boy from Medford, Mass., but rather an Irish pol from the near south side of Chicago. Back in 1995—when Mayor Bloomberg was just a glimmer in CEO Bloomberg’s eye—Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley got rid of his Board of Education and soon after started holding failing kids back. In 1999, Mr. Daley implemented 311 (yes, the same number New York has). By 2001, he had declared his intention to make Chicago the greenest city in the country and started planting flowers on top of City Hall to prove it.

“When the C-40 summit came, I gave the opening night’s reception speech and I unabashedly said we have stolen from cities all over the world,” said Dan Doctoroff, Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, referring to the C-40 Large Cities Climate Summit held in New York in May. “Chicago, as the city in many ways the most similar to New York in the U.S., is the prime target.”

So while New York, when it comes to things like the Olympics, congestion pricing and corporate headquarters, generally puts itself in the glamorous company of London, Moscow and Tokyo, the Big Apple has really been getting its juice from the hog butcher to the world.

Such imitation dates back maybe a century, to the first skyscraper. The Ferris Wheel, Jim Belushi and Tina Fey are all Chicago imports. Remember those fiberglass cows that littered New York’s sidewalks years ago, painted in all different colors with punning names like Moo York and Tutancowmon? Chicago (or rather Chi-cow-go) had them first. Chicago put the boom in the Manhattan Project: It was where they split the atom. The Chicago Manual of Style was created in, well, Chicago.

“The thing about Chicago is that they have a second-city complex,” said Ester Fuchs, a Columbia University political science professor and former adviser to Mayor Bloomberg who got her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1984. “People in Chicago obsess about New York, whereas in New York no one obsesses about Chicago. By and large, New Yorkers are very parochial. We think we came up with our own ideas.”

As for what Mayor Daley thinks of the sincerest form of flattery that Mr. Bloomberg has shown him, Deputy Press Secretary Jodi Kawada e-mailed, “Mayor Daley is certainly aware of the improvements Mayor Bloomberg has made in New York City, but he doesn’t claim any pride of ownership.”PERSONALLY, THE TWO MAYORS could not be further apart. The compact Mr. Bloomberg is the accidental mayor, a politician whose party allegiance is a matter of convenience, and one who is rich enough not to care that it is. The meatier Mr. Daley is the son of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was in office for 21 years—a record that Daley fils, now in his 19th year, is likely to break. Daley the younger grew up in a working class neighborhood and had his Democratic affiliation denied him as a result of some pansy-ass legal change that made all primaries in Chicago nonpartisan (a change that Mr. Bloomberg unsuccessfully sought for New York City also). He still is a member of the local and national Democratic Party, however, and has acquired an image of a managerial mayor only to the extent that a man named Daley is able to.

“Daley is much more of a political animal; Bloomberg is much more of a businessman,” said Dick Simpson, a former member of the Chicago City Council who teaches political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “In New York, there is no longer a Tammany machine; there is still a Daley machine.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s mimicry began early: Without any political roots, he had to rely on those of others. In the first days of his first term, he resurrected advisers from the Lindsay and Dinkins administrations, and was even considering hiring Paul Vallas, Chicago’s education chief, as schools chancellor. (Philadelphia hired him first.) Mr. Vallas had been the one who ran the new Chicago public schools, which Mayor Daley had assumed direct control over. Chicago’s model became widely imitated around the country. In fact, Mayor Giuliani had even tried to get rid of the Board of Education. But it was Mayor Bloomberg who, his first year in office, succeeded.

“Sometimes I think the thing about the Bloomberg administration is that there is this attitude that if someone has a good idea, we are not the least bit reluctant to use it and give credit where credit is due,” said Mr. Doctoroff. “Of course, it’s important for a city to be an innovator. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t more efficient to borrow someone else’s ideas and adapt them. It can show you the way politically. It can show you the way technologically.”

Mr. Doctoroff in fact went to law school at the University of Chicago in the early 1980’s. Andrew Alper, the former president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, went to college and business school there. But neither say that their backgrounds made them more receptive to the winds from the Windy City.

“The two mayors share a pragmatic approach,” said Mr. Alper, now chairman of EQA Partners, a hedge-fund company. “Beyond that, I don’t think there is any business relationship.”

What coordination came about usually occurred at lower levels of government. Ms. Fuchs, who worked on Mr. Bloomberg’s first election, recalled that the candidate came up with the idea for 311 during the campaign, while looking at page after page of phone numbers for city agencies. But he was following a well-traveled route: President Clinton proposed the number to relieve 911 operators of nonemergency police calls. Baltimore adopted it first. In 1999, Chicago configured 311 to field not just nonemergency police calls but all nonemergency calls for city government, later winning an award from Harvard’s Institute for Government Innovation as a result.

According to Mr. Daley’s press office, delegations came from New York to visit Chicago on two occasions about four years ago to consult on 311, and a delegation from Chicago went to New York to help implement it. Mr. Bloomberg inaugurated 311 in New York in March 2003.

The Bloomberg administration has also consciously mimicked Chicago’s efforts, dating back to Mayor Harold Washington’s administration in the mid-1980’s, to keep condo developers from pushing out still-vibrant manufacturers around the center of town. In 1990, Mayor Daley implemented the first “planned manufacturing districts” in which zoning would prohibit any conversion of industrial space for residential or commercial uses.

“I went out there for three or four days and had the opportunity to visit two or three of the planned manufacturing districts and spoke with my counterpart there,” said Carl Hum, the outgoing director of the mayor’s Office for Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses, who will start as president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce in September. “It was definitely recognized as the leading city in regards to industrial retention and had a lot of the same parallels to New York.”

Early last year, Mayor Bloomberg declared 16 areas around New York City, such as parts of Bushwick and Red Hook, as “industrial business zones”—which are less stringent versions of Chicago’s planned manufacturing districts.THERE MAY BE NO SHAME IN STEALING ideas from elsewhere, but there used to be a time—say, seven years ago—when New York was a net exporter of them. Mayor Giuliani spread his influence not just through his crime-fighting policies, but also by shedding staff, sometimes after nasty personality clashes. Commissioner William Bratton, Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple and Chief of Department John Timoney brought New York’s crime-fighting techniques to places like Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Miami. Mr. Bloomberg’s chief executive style has attracted followers such as Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles. But, according to Fred Siegel, a frequent critic of Mayor Bloomberg and a former adviser to Mayor Giuliani, the CEO mayor has yet to promulgate a platform.

“In the case of Giuliani, there was crime and welfare. In the case of Daley, we can talk about things that other cities have taken up. There are no comparable examples of Bloomberg,” said Mr. Siegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

When Mr. Bloomberg steals an idea from another mayor, however, he does not just scratch off the serial number and pretend it’s his. He gussies it up with extra reflectors and swoop-necked handlebars to make it far flashier, louder and—his supporters argue—more effective than the idea that he ripped off.

Witness his emphasis on illegal guns, which Mayor Daley had made a priority in the early 1990’s. When the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, Mr. Daley began a lonely lobbying campaign in Springfield to get state laws that would reinstate its power. Then along came Mayor Bloomberg, who, with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, founded an organization called Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They got more than 200 of their fellow municipal leaders to join them (including, eventually, Mayor Daley) and started lobbying not some cornfed legislators in a Midwestern capital but instead the real steak-eaters in Washington, D.C.

Similarly, Mayor Daley has been shuffling along for years on an environmental kick. He has long been a bicyclist himself and has created more amenities for bicyclists around the city (whereas Mayor Bloomberg bought a bike during the first threatened transit strike and quickly gave it away without riding it). He put a green roof on City Hall and, starting in 2005, issued a yearly “environmental action agenda” that tries to systematize his goals and methods. But when Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, a 155-page blueprint, hit the press in April, it made a thud around the country the way that only taxing car drivers could make.

Mayor Daley has planted 500,000 trees. Mayor Bloomberg seeks to plant a million.Mayor Daley pledged to reduce city government’s power consumption by 4 percent over four years (and failed to meet the target); Mayor Bloomberg is planning to bring New York’s level down by 30 percent within 10 years.

Mayor Daley wanted to reduce the city’s “environmental footprint” by 30 percent; Mayor Bloomberg reaches for a comparable figure—but with the added benefit of detailing how much pollution each of his 127 initiatives will avoid producing.

“It wasn’t anything nearly as specific. It wasn’t anywhere nearly as comprehensive or concrete,” said Mr. Doctoroff of Mayor Daley’s plan. “What we think PlaNYC does is to establish these goals and to lay out real-world funded initiatives in order to meet the goals.”

If New York does owe Chicago some props for the whole green idea, the balance of trade may finally tip back. Mayor Daley is now chasing the Olympics. Ms. Fuchs, the Columbia professor, recently lectured the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on how Chicago could become a more international city.

Last week, Douglas Foy, an independent consultant who served as special adviser on sustainability during the drafting of PlaNYC, was invited to stop in Chicago “to consult,” he said, “on energy strategies.” Whether that means there is a PlaNYC in Chicago’s future is hard to tell, but Mayor Daley, at the very least, is going to have to call it something different.

As community opposition continues to keep Wal-Mart out of the Big Apple, local retail broker extraordinaire Robert K. Futterman has come up with a brilliant solution to the big-box debacle: Kick the naysayers out of the approval process.

"If they keep going in front of [the City Planning Commission] and community boards, they're gonna have a problem," Futterman said in an interview with The Real Deal, available via podcast. "The ideal situation would be a location, whether it be New York or any of the other boroughs, where they can go in and operate without having to go get, you know, any approvals outside of the zoning."

Futterman isn't the first visionary to advocate substantial red-tape reductions that might favor the world's largest retailer's ongoing expansion plans. Last month, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley vetoed a law that would have required Wal-Mart and other large retailers in that city to increase workers' pay and benefits. After years of wrangling with pro-labor, anti-"Always Low Prices" activists in the Windy City, the big-box behemoth responded by unveiling its first store there on Sept. 28 and announcing its intentions to "aggressively pursue other sites," as well.

"With some patience and perseverance," Futterman said he expects Wal-Mart to experience similar success in opening a New York store "somewhere in the next five years." Probably, he added, in one of the outer boroughs--although the company's prior plans for Queens and Staten Island didn't exactly pan out.

On a related note, Futterman predicted the future of retail in South Bronx was "absolutely phenomenal."

- Chris Shott

Here is a sample straight out of the syllabus.

Bloomberg, who coasted to re-election based partly on the claim of gaining control of the school system, seems to have been in a particularly magnanimous frame of mind when writing the piece, crediting his predecessors for their role in effectuating the takeover.

--Jason Horowitz

In fact, the post-election campaign might actually be useful, because it is offering further insights into the character of the two would-be, could-be Presidents. And those insights are not encouraging. Regardless of the eventual outcome of the re-count and any subsequent litigation–this election might go to the Supreme Court, and perhaps it should–it seems clear that we've elected a shmegegi , whomever he may be.

As the long drama in Florida played out on television screens around the world, voters–many of whom seemed riveted by the spectacle of history in the making–saw not statesmanship befitting the occasion but cheap evasions, political posturing and slick public relations. The candidates themselves allowed the public to view for the most part only pre-arranged, and perhaps even poll-tested, images. There's George W. Bush drinking coffee at the kitchen table and chatting affably with friends, with his black, female foreign-affairs adviser, Condoleeza Rice, prominently featured. There's Al Gore playing touch football with his family, acting as though he hadn't a care in the world. What pathetic performances. Presumably Governor Bush and the Vice President want us to think that they really aren't on pins and needles, that they aren't intimately involved in the back-room jockeying in Florida. Absurd.

A recent study presented to the American Psychological Association found that great Presidents tended to be stubborn and assertive–which would seem to bode well for either Mr. Gore or Mr. Bush. But the study also found that great Presidents tended to be interested in art and beauty; the spectacle in Florida is artless and unattractive.

Meanwhile, the two camps have dispatched a couple of retreads in James Baker III and Warren Christopher to make their leaders' arguments to the viewing public. The sound of Mr. Baker pleading for court intervention to prevent a re-count by hand in the disputed Florida counties brought back chilling memories of his stewardship over the State Department during Bush I. This was the man, remember, who made the case for the Persian Gulf War by saying it was all about jobs. What an uplifting moment in the annals of American diplomatic and military history! Mr. Baker is to political argument what Jack Benny was to the violin. If there's a wrong note to sound, he'll find it.

For his part, Mr. Christopher mumbles his way through the proceedings, looking at times like a senior citizen trying to come to terms with a butterfly ballot. Worse still is Mr. Gore's campaign manager William Daley, who manages to keep a straight face as he talks about voter fraud on a scale unknown to American history. Mr. Daley, of course, is the son of the late Chicago mayor, Richard Daley, whose skills as a political operator were of Biblical proportions. Actually, Daley put those New Testament miracles to shame: Lazarus, after all, rose from the dead but once. Had he lived and died in Chicago, he would have been resurrected several times in accordance with the Daley machine's needs.

Here in New York, the Presidential deadlock has offered a glimpse into the character of our Senator-elect. Again, the view is not encouraging. Hillary Rodham Clinton, not a week into her new role as an elected official, announced to an uncaring world that she believed the Electoral College ought to be disbanded. "I've always thought we had outlived the need for an Electoral College," she said. And now that she is about to become a U.S. Senator, well, she can put her thoughts into action! "I am going to try to do what I can to make clear that the popular vote, the will of the people, should be followed," she vowed. But what if the people believe the Electoral College serves a useful purpose? Not to worry–Senator-elect Clinton knows what's best for you. She'll come up with a wonderful reform package and cure the nation's political system, just as she cured our health-care crisis.

So, thanks to our prolonged electoral nightmare, we know a little bit more about Al Gore, George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Come January, when two of these three people will be sworn into office, we'll be able to look forward not to a new beginning, but to a continuation of the last eight years–a time when spin, image and mendacity are everything, and when statesmanship, patriotism and the national interest are just words from a bygone era.