Ryan Lizza's extremely detailed, 15000 word piece (in next week's New Yorker) on Barack Obama's Chicago life does a fantastic job of delineating the different forces in Windy City politics over the past twenty years. What was most interesting, however, was the way in which the piece explains Obama's simultaneous ability to criticize "the system" and operate within it. For example:One day in the spring of 2001, about a year after the loss to Rush, ...