Here Comes Vallas

Rahm's most likely opponent - unless he manages to win 50%-plus-1 out of the box:

• Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas got an early rise out of Mayor Rahm Emanuel by accusing the mayor of “punting” Chicago’s $36 billion pension crisis during his first term, making the problem infinitely worse.
  
  Now, Vallas, 64, is launching his campaign by intensifying his attack on the issue of stabilizing city finances — the issue Emanuel views as his greatest strength.
  
  He argued Emanuel’s failure to push a “pension equity bill” for Chicago Public School teachers while Democrat Pat Quinn was still governor will cost taxpayers an additional $1.5 billion.

And he's hammering Rahm on police manpower:

• Vallas hammered the mayor for reneging on a 2011 campaign promise to hire 1,000 additional police officers and allowing police manpower to dip to dangerous levels before embarking on a two-year hiring blitz after the murder rate soared.
  
  The mayor also balanced his first budget by closing police stations and eliminating more than 1,400 police vacancies.
  
  “When I was city budget director, we built the police force to 13,500. We had 1,200 detectives on the street,” Vallas said.
  
  “They have played the attrition game and allowed those positions to plummet….I’ve seen numbers as low as 600. Others have told me 800. And you wonder why the [homicide clearance rate] is 16 or 17 percent? What they did for four or five years was totally de-stabilize the police department.”

Rahm hits back weakly:

• Emanuel has already branded Vallas the “architect of kicking the can down the road.”
  
  His response to Vallas campaign launch had a similar ring.
  
  “As he did in Philadelphia and New Orleans, Paul Vallas left Chicagoans a fiscal time bomb….Paul Vallas planted the seeds of the pension crisis when he raided pensions to pay for expenses” and “eliminated the dedicated funding set aside just for pensions,” the mayor’s campaign spokesman Peter Giangreco wrote in an email.

Rahm and his people leave out one thing - Vallas was working for and answered to someone else - Shortshanks. And if Rahm goes down that road, he's going to have to invoke the name of "Daley" at some point and then Bill is going to get all annoyed.