Obama: That's the Chicago Way.

Make no little plans
Two world's fairs. A river turned backward. Sweeping parks along the lakefront. Two or three of the world's tallest buildings. O'Hare Airport. Millennium Park.

The Olympics in 2016. (Bet on it.)

Big civic achievements don't happen by chance. There are reasons Chicago is not just another rusted-out postindustrial Midwestern city. Chicago's political culture, for all its money-grubbing corruption, has always been receptive to the next bold idea.

Obama is thinking big in that Chicago Way in Washington. He wants to fix the health care system, fix Social Security, fix the economy, fix the schools, fix everything.

He's bound to fail, of course. He can't fix everything.

Just as Chicago could not completely carry out its audacious Burnham Plan of 1909, a blueprint for transforming whole neighborhoods.

But without big plans, Obama won't fix anything.

Just as without the Burnham Plan, Chicago today would not have its extraordinary lakefront.

Breathe easy, America. Barack Obama picked up his politics in a crooked town, but he walked a straight line. He's not the first Chicago pol to go honest and he won't be the last.