I don’t want to gloat.

Well…allow me a slightly suppressed chortle.

There was a brief moment I thought the Obamagician might pull it off, but Olympian politics proved too mighty even for himself—and I suspect he knew it.

There seemed a reluctance on his part to make the trip, but all those Chicagoistas in the White House—some of whom seem to love Mayor Daley more than the president himself—pushed him into it and into a short-term loss. I doubt anyone will be getting a one-way ticket home quite yet, but it may be a while before the president takes another urgent call from the mayor.

It was one interesting thing for the mayor to be out-organized on the international ward map, but quite another to see the job that was done against him in his own back yard. Tom Tresser and his rag-tag batch of No Games people were out there everywhere doing hand-to-hand combat against the Willy Loman grins of the billionaire boosters gang who were fighting tooth and nail for their every piece of the Olympic Pie.

Well, at least we won’t have to spend the next six years staring at Smilin’ Pat Ryan of the beloved insurance industry and his annoying sidekick Lori Healy as they graciously count their profits.

I am fairly well convinced that, although Rio was almost a certain winner, the fact that Chicago had so much built-in public opposition was a central backup issue for the International Olympic Committee. Shortly before the Olympic vote, public support had dropped to 47 percent favorable and 45 percent opposed; while in other cities vying for the games the numbers were 75-84 percent positive.

To be sure, the No Games organizers did not do it all. Coming off of Daley’s parking meter fiasco (amazing how those four words seem to flow so naturally together), a huge portion of the public might be ready to vote against the White Sox just because they’re Daley’s team.

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. I suspect, too, he saw this coming before the Tribune did and was cooking up a lot of circuses to get people’s mind off the bread he is costing them.

Another massive cookout in Grant Park or festival of Baltic Music will not do it. Maybe free tickets to the next 100 Bears games might buy back a little love.

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

Last week I suggested the reformers might have to go back in time to bring forth the third—Adlai Stevenson the third, that is. But the 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.

As sheriff he got national attention by refusing to evict hardscrabble foreclosure cases. Then he busted up a national prostitution ring operating on the Craig’s List website.

Then he got even bigger play with the Burr Oak Cemetery case, handling it all in a compassionate, quietly dignified way.

The next thing that falls his way is a dog-fighting ring.

It is on any single such case that careers are built. They are neither liberal nor conservative. They are what we call good-guy issues—nobody dares take the other side except maybe Roman Polanski.

Most politicians dream of getting such cases once in a career—and this guy gets four in the blink of an eye. That means he is lucky, too—another arrow in the successful politician’s quiver. Lucky enough even to have a name that sounds like a comic strip hero: Tom Dart indeed!

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Don Rose is a regular columnist at the Chicago Daily Observer