Today, the feed’s creator has revealed himself to The Atlantic as Dan Sinker, founder of the now-defunct zine Punk Planet and journalism professor at Columbia College in Chicago. The Atlantic has published a fascinating article about Sinker, and the meaning of one of the most compelling Twitter odysseys we’ve yet to see from the new medium.

Said Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic:

And in some sense, the glory of @MayorEmanuel was that it exposed the dark humor that political operatives know and love, mixed with the drunken idealism that tends to drive the politicos. Politics is desperate and raw and exhausting, yet on TV it looks so polished and prim. It’s a knock-down, drag-out war in which everyone has to fight in their Sunday best. @MayorEmanuel looked at that state of affairs and started cussing, not unlike what a lot of us do when we look at our politics.

Read more about the real @MayorEmanuel here.

But the city he inherits, though perhaps more beautiful than ever after years of extensive urban improvements, is in financial straits that it hasn’t seen since before Daley’s father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, came to power in the 1950s.

“Not since the Great Depression have the finances of the city been this precarious,” said Dominic Pacyga, a historian and author of “Chicago: A Biography.” The city’s next budget deficit could again exceed $500 million, mostly the result of reduced tax revenue from the recession, and could reach $1 billion if the city properly funds its pension system.

Emanuel, who takes office May 16, also faces a fractious political landscape.

He’ll have to find new leadership for the struggling public school system, as two top interim executives plan to leave. He’ll also need a new police chief, having said he would not renew Police Superintendent Jody Weis’ contract. The department is suffering from low morale and staffing estimated at 1,000 officers below previous levels.

Members of the City Council, including a number elected Tuesday, have made clear they will demand more authority after years of domination by Daley.

In 25 years of public life, Emanuel has earned a reputation as a skilled politician and as a political operative, serving in both the Clinton and Obama administrations and as a congressman from Chicago. But the mayor’s office will test his mettle as an executive.

Throughout the campaign, Emanuel has acknowledged he’ll have to make budget cuts, and has promised to spread the pain as fairly as possible, starting with his own office.

But, like the other candidates, he has been vague about how he’ll accomplish the reductions. And nothing he has suggested comes close to the projected deficit.

Emanuel said he can save $110 million by streamlining “outdated and duplicative work processes to focus on front-line service delivery,” according to his campaign. His campaign did not use the word “layoffs,” but it did allude to “reducing layers of management bureaucracy and consolidating redundant tasks.”

“What comes next is a bunch of ugly,” said Ralph Martire, executive director of the bipartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. “It’s going to be a brutal budget year and there are not quick and easy fixes.”

The politics of the cuts could be perilous. Most of the deficit is in the $3.1 billion general fund, which pays for the police and fire departments, which have been cut significantly since 2000, Martire said.

As for the underfunded pensions, Emanuel said he wants to “preserve” the pensions but may seek to negotiate changes. He insists the city can solve the problems without a confrontation like the one in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of people have been demonstrating outside the Capitol to protest anti-union budget cut legislation. “We have to find, I think, common ground and a sense of hope,” he said during a campaign stop this week.

Still, some Chicago officials say the pensions will be hard to finesse. “This mayor is going to have to find a way to balance that too, in a way that doesn’t alienate our city workers, who are incredibly hardworking folks,” said Alderman Sandi Jackson.

Already, various unions are bracing for a fight. More than a half dozen unions endorsed Chico, including the police and fire unions.

Emanuel has also talked about expanding the city sales tax to include more services, while lowering its overall rate, but he’ll need approval from the state General Assembly.

Many voters hope Emanuel’s clout in national politics will help him find outside avenues for help. President Obama expressed support for Emanuel when he left the White House, and heavy hitters in the political and entertainment communities contributed to his campaign.

“He’s (got) political savvy. He’s politically tied in. That’s important to me because he can get things done,” said Ralph Vallot, 57, dean of students at a Chicago high school.

Loren Miller, 65, who is retired and served as an election judge at a Michigan Avenue polling place, said it’s a turning point for the city. “The future’s going to be interesting. This is going to be a tough period of time for the city,” Miller said.

Associated Press writer Deanna Bellandi contributed to this report.

Emanuel’s pending success is noteworthy when you consider the struggles that other chiefs of staff have faced when they’ve tried to enter (or reenter) elected politics after leaving the White House.

Those who have failed to make the leap include Erskine Bowles (a Clinton chief of staff), who waged futile Senate bids in North Carolina in 2002 and 2004; Hamilton Jordan (Carter, who lost a 1986 Democratic Senate primary to Wyche Fowler in Georgia;  and Al Haig (Nixon), who dropped out of the 1988 Republican presidential race after finishing with 0 percent in Iowa. You could also make a case for including Donald Rumsfeld (Ford), who seemed ready to seek the ’88 GOP presidential nod but who was marginalized by his old Ford-era  enemy, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush; and Andrew Card (Bush 43), who showed interest in running for office (for Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat or for governor) but opted not to, likely because of the grief his Bush association would cause him in blue state Massachusetts.

The success stories include Dick Cheney, who parlayed his Ford White House gig into a successful U.S. House campaign in Wyoming in 1978; and Jim Jones (LBJ), who went on to serve seven terms in the House from Oklahoma from 1973 to 1987, ending his career with a losing Senate campaign against Republican Don Nickles. Barring a completely unforeseen development (another residency challenge?!), Rahm Emanuel will soon be joining their ranks.

“This is a critical election for the future of the city of Chicago. We’re at a crossroads,” front-runner Rahm Emanuel said as he greeted commuters at a South Side train station.

The campaign began last fall when Daley — with his wife ailing, six terms under his belt, and a future of fiscal challenges facing Chicago — announced he wouldn’t seek re-election.

The candidates who rushed in to fill that void included Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff; former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun; former Chicago public schools president Gery Chico; and City Clerk Miguel del Valle.

Emanuel led in the polls and in fundraising since he announced he was running last fall, and his confident, no-nonsense style resonated with many voters. Chico finished second in most of the polls, ahead of Braun and del Valle but far behind Emanuel.

To win Tuesday, a candidate must secure more than 50 percent of the vote, or face a runoff against the second place finisher on April 5.

Whoever wins will give the city a mayor unlike any it has had before: Emanuel would be Chicago’s first Jewish mayor, Braun would be its first black woman mayor, and Chico or del Valle would be the city’s first Hispanic mayor.

Justin Blake, a 42-year-old black general contractor who chatted with Emanuel on Tuesday, said voting for him was a no-brainer because of Emanuel’s “knowledge of what’s going on, not only here locally but worldwide.

“He’s been right up there with the president; why wouldn’t you vote for somebody who’s got that much collateral behind him?” Blake said.

Mark Arnold, 23, an auditor voting at a downtown polling place, said he is excited at the prospect of change.

“I think Daley’s done a lot of good things, but at the same time I just feel like the city right now, it’s kind of like a good old boys’ club,” Arnold said, saying the election would bring in “someone with new ideas who’s been in other places.”

Daley has been criticized for allowing the city to spend beyond its means, and Chicago’s finances were further damaged by the economic downturn of the last few years. The new mayor will have to quickly decide on a politically unpalatable strategy for improving city finances that may well involve raising taxes and cutting services and public employee benefits.

The five-month campaign took many unusual turns, even for a city where voting from six feet under is part of election lore. But after a race that included a challenge of Emanuel’s right to call himself a Chicagoan going all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court and Braun accusing another candidate of being strung out on crack cocaine, some voters complained they had not heard enough about where the candidates stood on the issues.

Some said they were focused more on the candidates’ resumes and influence.

“Daley had connections,” said Terrence Trampiets, 66, a North Side resident intending to vote for Emanuel. “You have to have that to get things done.”

Daley’s lock on City Hall had left many voters complacent. His decision at age 68 not to run again unleashed a sudden flurry of potential interest in running from nearly two dozen politicians, including the county sheriff, congressmen, state lawmakers and members of the City Council.

But the campaign focus quickly shifted from City Hall to the White House when Emanuel announced he was interested in the job — weeding many lesser-known candidates in the process.

That was followed by a sometimes weird tussle over whether Emanuel was a city resident and therefore even eligible to run because he had not lived in Chicago for a full year before the election, as required by law. He had lived in Washington working for Obama since soon after giving up his North Side congressmen’s seat in 2008.

The residency challenge turned into a spectacle that saw Emanuel on a Board of Elections witness stand in a makeshift courtroom in the basement of a downtown building being grilled for a dozen hours by regular Chicago residents with some very irregular questions, such as one from a man who asked if Emanuel had been involved in the 1993 Branch Davidian siege at Waco, Texas, when he worked for the Clinton administration.

Several tense days followed when an appellate court ordered Emanuel’s name thrown off the ballot, before the state’s Supreme Court stepped in and definitively ruled that Emanuel was a resident and could indeed run for mayor. Until then, Emanuel’s rivals had painted him as an outsider.

Meanwhile, a group of African-American leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, decided that their best hope of electing a black mayor was to convince all but one of the major black candidates to drop out of the race. Both U.S. Rep. Danny Davis and State Sen. James Meeks, the pastor of a megachurch on Chicago’s South Side, ended their candidacies and threw their support behind Braun.

The city’s first black mayor was Harold Washington, who was elected in 1983. The first woman mayor was Jane Byrne, elected in 1979.

The black consensus effort marked a return to the spotlight for Braun, who last won election in 1992 when she became the first African-American woman to win a U.S. Senate seat. She had largely been out of the spotlight since she announced a longshot bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004.

But Braun made headlines when, after rival Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins wondered aloud at a debate about Braun’s absence from public life, Braun shot back that the reason Van Pelt-Watkins didn’t know what she’d been up to was that she had been “strung out on crack.”

Van Pelt-Watkins said afterward she’d had a drug problem years ago, but denied ever using crack, and Braun later apologized. But she often showed sharp elbows during the campaign, in particular during exchanges with Emanuel. Some polls had her stuck in single digits or the teens while Emanuel scored well above 40 percent.

The other two main candidates, Chico and del Valle, have throughout the campaign struggled to get media attention, in large part because the fight over Emanuel’s residency took center stage. A sixth candidate, William “Dock” Walls, is also running.

Associated Press writer Lindsey Tanner contributed to this report.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

Rahm Emanuel pushed on with his campaign Thursday, including attending a planned a televised debate. But the real debate over his chances of becoming Chicago’s next mayor went on behind closed doors.

If Illinois’ highest court does not restore the former White House chief of staff to the ballot, Emanuel’s other options such as a write-in campaign or an appeal to the federal courts appeared less promising.

“There are a lot of potential chess moves out there, but his best shot is with the Illinois Supreme Court,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who heads the school’s election law program. Everything else, he said, “looks like a long shot.”

Emanuel, who’s ahead in the polls and has far more money than his competitors, has been fighting for two months to stay in the race after some voters alleged that he did not meet a requirement that candidates live in Chicago for at least a year before the election.

On Monday, an appeals court threw him off the ballot because he lived for two years in Washington working for President Barack Obama. Emanuel swiftly appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.

If the high court does not restore his name, Emanuel could run as a write-in candidate. But even if he were to win, experts said, he might not be able to take office because he has not lived in Chicago long enough.

“That requirement would seem to be applicable whether you’re listed on the ballot or whether you’re a write-in candidate,” said Mark Rosen, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

The bottom line, said Chicago election attorney Adam Lasker, is that no matter how many people vote for Emanuel, it won’t help him actually become mayor.

“I would say no matter what you do, I don’t think you’ll be able to take the oath of office,” he said.

Late last year, the Chicago Board of Elections and a Cook County judge ruled that Emanuel was entitled to be on the ballot. Then the appellate court reversed that decision.

Emanuel, who moved back to Chicago in October to run for mayor, says he’s always been a resident because he owns a house here, votes and pays taxes here, and only left the city at the personal request of the president.

The state Supreme Court could announce a decision anytime.

Emanuel has not said what he might do if the high court rules against him, whether he would pursue a write-in campaign, take his case to federal court or both. On Thursday, he said he is not huddling with his lawyers.

“Do I look like a huddler?” he said to laughs at a campaign stop. “I don’t think I look a huddler, and I don’t know what a huddler looks like. OK? And no, I’m not with my lawyers, I’m with the people.”

If he does go to federal court, experts say, Emanuel’s chances of success are not good.

Dawn Clark Netsch, a law professor and constitutional scholar who has blasted the appeals court decision, said she sees “no significant federal constitutional issue” that Emanuel could argue.

Ann Lousin, professor at the John Marshall Law School, said the federal courts might be an option if Emanuel could show that some kind of conspiracy deprived him of his federal right to due process. But, she added, she does not see any conspiracy.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding Emanuel, he was invited to a major televised debate sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, WGN and the City Club of Chicago.

Joining him would be the other candidates — former Chicago public schools President Gery Chico, former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and City Clerk Miguel del Valle.

But if Emanuel’s candidacy remains in doubt, the news media are “going to be focused on this decision and how this plays out and much less on substantive issues,” said Alan Gitelson, a Loyola University political scientist.

“The candidates needed to debate among themselves,” Gitelson said. “And now there isn’t a lot of room to do that.”

——

Associated Press Writer Deanna Bellandi contributed to this report.