An interesting feature on Greg Nickels in this week’s Seattle Weekly. Laura Onstot considers the rap laid against Nickels—by Jan Drago, Knute Berger, and others—that he’s a big bully playing what the Weekly itself earlier called “Chicago-style hardball politics” on a West Coast softball field. She weighs some of Nickels’ fastest pitches and most notorious beanballs—firing Jim Diers, the popular director of the Department of Neighborhoods; merging another City Hall fixture, film office manager Donna James, out of a job; slapping total control on city departments, dispensing fear and favors to neighborhoods according to whether they play ball—against the much harder ball of such Chicago political icons as the two Richard Daleys and, yes, Al Capone.

Onstot’s analysis peters out at the end: Nickels probably doesn’t rise to Chicago’s hardball standards, but it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he did. A few points she doesn’t mention: Nickels was the protégé of Norm Rice, the mayor widely dismissed as “Mayor Nice”: Before getting elected county councilmember he was then-City Councilmember Rice’s longtime aide. And the main rap against him when he first ran for mayor in 2001 was that he too was “too nice” for the job, in contrast to his supposedly nasty opponent Mark Sidran.

What happened to change all that? Once he was elected, Nickels "found his Mr. Hyde," as one city veteran puts it: He hired Tim Ceis, formerly County Executive Ron Sims’s chief of staff, as deputy mayor. Ceis’s official biography says he "is responsible for all policy and operational issues for the mayor." In other words, he run the city day-to-day. Unofficially, he’s known as the Shark. He’s as forceful, feared, and influential a No. 2 in his way as Dick Cheney was in his—and much less secretive. He’s the one behind the scenes and out front when the bureaucratic hits get made.

So much for the Chicago connection. Nickels’s critics make much of the fact that he was born there, though his family moved when he was an infant. But Ceis has deep local civic roots: His mother, Margaret Ceis, was a prominent West Seattle activist, a Seattle Parks Commission chair-and a Rosie the Riveter at Boeing during World War II. Chicago may have its bosses, but the Shark is all Seattle.

One other difference: Chicago under Daley Sr. was "the city that works." No one seems to call Seattle that these days.