Rahm wins in suburban straw vote and by Twitter-meter

“How many of you are going to vote for Rahm,” I asked the group sitting around the dinner table.

No last name was needed to pose the question.

Just like Bono, Shaq, Elmo and other notorious four-letter, single-name celebrities, Rahm is all they needed to know.

Does anyone know how to spell his last name anyway? Emanuel? Emmanuel? Emmanuel? Emanuel? Eh, Manuel?

Does anyone care? Really, only the location of his residence seems important.

So, “How many of you are going to vote for Rahm,” I asked the group sitting around the dinner table.

Not a single hand went up.

There is a reason that Rahm received no votes in my straw poll.

The table was in the suburbs, and the hands were all attached to non-Chicago voters.

There was a time (and in some parts of Chicago the time is still now) where it didn't matter whether you lived in the city. You could still vote illegally of course.

In fact, nonregistered, noncity voters are sometimes favored by ballot-box-stuffers because they didn't have a previous city paper trail.

In Chicago, though, the dead make absolutely the best illegal voters because they usually have a voter registration that can be assumed by someone else.

They are followed closely by nursing home residents who have live voter cards but are usually delighted to get a little ballot assistance. “Here, Bertha, let me help you mark the box” says the poll helper as he pencils the box for his boss.

As I tested the Rahmeter at a suburban social event, all hands went up when I asked “If you could vote in the Chicago mayoral election, who would you vote for?”

Oh Come, Oh Come, Emanuel (sic.)

The usual explanation goes something like this: “I don't really like him, but he seems like such an SOB and that's what Chicago needs right now. The deficit and all. Plus he's Obama's guy.”

Rahm is also playing along with this residence hearing spectacle because it is free publicity and actually makes him somewhat of a sympathetic character for the first time in his political career.

Seriously, if Chicago's future is to be determined by the number of storage boxes in a Ravenswood basement then we might as well all move to Wasilla, Alaska.

The last public farce of this magnitude was in 1985 when then-Gov. Jim Thompson commandeered Chicago TV channels, interrupting Saturday morning cartoons, to conduct clemency hearings in a fake rape case and projected the nylon panties of the bogus victim on a large screen behind him.

Whether Rahm ends up on the ballot and whether or not he wins, he is quite a celebrity judging only by the Twitter gauge.

“Wish this residency stuff would end so I can get to Whole Foods and get some arugula and share with Barack” was a tweet sent out on Saturday morning by “MayorRahm,” one of at least 19 sites set up in his name, most by impostors.

“Happy the residency hearing is done. Need to start looking for private schools in the area” was the previous message.

Most of the postings on all of the fake sites are vile. Hilariously so. Some capture Rahm's infamous use of the F-word and the MF-word so well, that they seem like actual quotes.

It's fitting that Rahm is a four-letter word even though the candidate himself hasn't suffered any public outbursts.

The word has spread so fast on one of the apparently unauthorized Twitter names, MayorEmanuel, that more than 6,100 people are now following every outrageous posting.

Some of the other Chicago mayoral candidates don't even have their own Twitter sites, much less fakes.

Especially with easy-access, electronic social networks it sometimes is difficult in Chicago to determine reality from fiction.

For example, which statement below attributed to one of the 15 mayoral hopefuls last week was actually said by the candidate:

1. “I don't understand why people are mocking my ethics reform pledge. It's believable.”

2. “I think that the word ‘minority,' from our standpoint, should mean African-American. I don't think that women, Asians and Hispanics should be able to use that title.”

The first quote was a tweet posted by a Rahm Emanuel impostor.

The second was actually stated by a mayoral candidate, Democratic state Sen. James Meeks.

As I said, sometimes in Chicago politics it is difficult to discern reality.

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by e-mail at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie.