All politics is local, and in Chicago, thankfully, the show never stops. The commedia dell'arte has all the stock characters but the surprise is in the rawness.
Nobody in the audience believes there is more weeping and wailing in heaven when a rich man falls than there is when a poor man is tripped. So, no tribunals, no secret lists and no happy endings. Just blood on the floor and the sound of blades being whetted.
Last week the former city treasurer, Miriam Santos, began a three-year jail term for campaign funds corruption. The audiotape of her putting the arm on government contractors was primetime all week.
Governor George Ryan was fighting off twin problems. His Department of Transportation sold commercial driving licences under the table. One of these found its way to the scene of an accident in which six people died.
There's more. A spectacular father-versus-son feud is tearing apart the Chicago fire department. We marvel also at the case of the unabashed city official with more than 100 of his extended family in well-paid city jobs ("Well, they've all got qualifications"), and we count the seconds during the long pause before Mayor Richard Daley explains how his friends, the Duff family, ended up with $100 million of city contracts earmarked for minority groupings.
What with it being business as usual in the graft world, it's no surprise to read poll figures suggesting that only about 9 per cent of Americans have taken a serious look at the line-up for next year's presidential elections.
CERTAINLY most Chicagoans aren't ready for the quadrennial peek at what lies beyond the pageant passing their front garden fence. The apathy hasn't stifled the boys and girls who would be president, however. They've been campaigning like rats in heat for some time now.
In the space of seven hectic days last week Dan Quayle deprived late-night talk-show hosts of a year's worth of monologue fodder by withdrawing from the Republican race, departing with the rueful comment that the race was just about over.
George W. Bush, the foremost shrub in the Republican garden, has indeed attracted $56 million in a fund-raising sweep which has become his most significant political achievement to date. Undeterred, however, a former war hero and Republican maverick, Senator John McCain, officially joined the race on the same day as Quayle left it, announcing that the game was only just on.
Pat Buchanan inched closer to walking up the aisle with the Reform Party, a marriage of convenience for everyone except Republicans, who fear a repeat of the damage done by little Ross Perot in 1992.
And Gary Bauer, the poster-boy of the rabid right, spent the week fending off veiled innuendos about marital infidelities.
And that's the dull stuff. On the Democratic side of the argument things are less complicated but more interesting. Bill Bradley has coursed Al Gore in the polls in New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York to the point where he is level or ahead in all three primary contests.
He has raised more money than Gore. He has benefited, too, from being the sole challenger, gaining almost equal access to the airwaves, and he carries ample celebrity cachet after a lifetime in the public eye as basketball player, author and politician. No firebrand orator himself, Bradley's contest with Gore at times takes on the comical aspect of a race between glaciers.
Gore has responded, deliberately redefining himself in the past week as the feisty underdog. To prove his feistiness he kicked a little transom, moving his campaign lock, stock and barrel out of Washington and down to Nashville, Tennessee, where he becomes the most wooden celeb since Hank Williams stopped singing about Kaw-liga, the cigar-store Indian.
There is a minority point of view which holds that Gore is a savvy political operator trapped in the personality of a telegraph pole. The theory stands up best in any survey of the company Gore keeps. Eight years sharing the same air as Bill Clinton means the chances are he picked up more than dating tips.
IN the flux of the past week observers were keen to trace out the influence of one Tony Coelho, the hard-man campaign manager appointed by Gore back in April.
Coelho has what it takes to become one of the stars of the new political season. He once said the best he could say about a Ronald Reagan debate appearance was that "he didn't quite drool" and he beautifully characterised George Bush snr as the sort of cowboy who "wears boots over his Argyll socks".
Coelho could be the best and the worst thing to have happened to Al Gore. He bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Al Pacino character in Scent of a Woman and he is equally irascible. He is a Californian, but in looks and disposition he belongs right here in Chicago.
In 1989 he got out of town before the posse arrived, resigning from Congress before he could be asked about alleged financial improprieties. Back in the 1980s, Coelho had created the great and often careless Democratic Party money-making machine, which flushed the party with wealth and would later bring embarrassment on the houses of both Clinton and Gore.
So there was some surprise when Gore, who needs to be near sleaze like a hay-fever sufferer needs to be near pollen, asked Coelho on board. But it was conceded on both sides of the argument that if Gore could not be turned into a song-and-dance man, Coelho could at least make him into a dancing bear.
The little bit of Chicago that Tony Coelho must have somewhere in his heart keeps seeping out, however. He oversaw the American exhibition at the World Expo in Lisbon last year and lived large in the process.
Tony had a good time in Portugal, land of his ancestors. He hired his niece to work for him, took out a private loan of $300,000 which he may have stuck the US government with repayments for, misused over $210,000 of airline tickets and rode everywhere in a chauffeur-driven limo. (With top-class competition like that Ireland did well in deciding to ignore Expo. No point in embarrassing ourselves with our venalities.)
Last weekend Coelho was severely criticised for his high rolling by State Department investigators, whose report brought a nervous little blush to Al Gore's cheeks.
Not many people are watching yet but by the time the Democratic race heads into its oddly compressed primary season in January, Gore and Bradley will be wading through a bloodbath, while George W. Bush moves serenely towards his coronation.
It was all supposed to happen the other way round, but every new poll suggests that when the big show winds down colourful Tony Coelho won't be back riding the hog in Washington with Al Gore.
Good. Chicago (unofficial motto: "Where's mine?") needs more men like him.