After Mayor Daley's Olympics campaign came to a screeching halt in Copenhagen last week, the conversation in Chicago quickly turned to the 2011 municipal elections.  As recent polling shows, the mayor is as vulnerable as he's ever been.  The parking meter debacle, rising crime, a gaping budget deficit, and the string of City Hall indictments have all contributed to his weakened state.  But the conventional wisdom is that those poll numbers mean little until a challenger steps up.  Yesterday, political consultant Don Rose proposed one possible contender in his Chicago Daily Observer column:

Daley has become an unpopular mayor—his numbers are at 35 percent according to the most recent Tribune poll—and it’s hard to recover from that kind of slide. [...]

As I mentioned last week, however, it may be time to start thinking of replacements for 2011. [...]

[T]he regulars have a near perfect young man waiting in the wings—and this young man has done little if anything I can think of to engender any opposition from the reformers (though I have a few friends who will surely advise me about any hint of dirt under his fingernails.)

I speak here of Sheriff Tom Dart, who may be the hottest political property in the state. He is a former white state representative from a majority African American district who built a record of child protection and sensible anticrime measures.

Rose is quite right that Dart is sitting pretty these days.  He has national profile, a "good guy" reputation, and appears to be on decent terms with both the "regulars" and the "reformers."   Expect to see Dart's name floated often in the coming months.