I woke up the other night thinking about Jane Swift, the sort-of-acting-kind-of governor who took over in Massachusetts when Paul Cellucci resigned to become U.S. ambassador to Canada in 2001.

It wasn’t a nightmare. I didn’t bolt up in bed, screaming “No, No, not Jane Swift.”

I was thinking about her brief, rocky tenure as governor – and how it might relate to the Chicago weirdness of Rahm Emanuel, who had to fight his way through three levels of courts and split decisions and Acts of God before being declared a real, live, resident of Chicago – and thus eligible to run for mayor.

While the Illinois Supreme Court finally put everyone out of their misery and told Rahm he could run for mayor, even though he was kind of, sort of, a resident of Washington, D.C., where he was chief-of-staff to President Barack Obama, I thought the appellate court was a bit closer to the truth when it had rejected his candidacy.

The Chicago municipal code says candidates for mayor must “reside” in the city for the year before their candidacy, not, as Emanuel argued, have “legal residence” in Chicago, which he did have. Sort of.

If this sounds like the kind of “law” best settled in a bar over three bottles of beer, so be it. The law is the law, even if it is odd.

Aside from the profound legal issues at the heart of the Emanuel case, the more interesting question is whether such “residency” requirements make much sense at all, when what is at stake is the management of a major American city. Is there a bit of management wisdom that suggests where your head hits the pillow at night is key to successful management and governance?

Peripatetic Manager

That brings us back to Jane Swift. Aside from the political ticks that eventually led to Swift’s popularity ratings on roughly the same level as the MBTA, one of the major complaints against her was that she lived in Williamstown, which might as well have been in Canada somewhere. She insisted on commuting home most nights from Boston – the center of the universe, where Massachusetts governors belong.

In an era of wandering professionals, crossing the globe to pluck human and financial capital from wherever they might be found, it is almost quaint to demand artificial geographic fidelity from government executives. There is even a case to be made that such requirements, and the instinct that encourages them, make government worse, not better.

Writing a year ago on the subject, Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield complained that “state and local politics…are mainly the province of the stay-at-homes in an increasingly mobile society. This not only tends to give a parochial cast to the officials’ perceptions of the problems that face the people, but also means that their education, formative occupations, and experience in the world may put blinders on them that distinctively affect their capacity to devise solutions even to the problems they discern.”

On the other hand, once Mitt Romney escaped from Michigan and did his Harvard-Boston Consulting Group-Bain thing for many years, it would have been hard to argue that he was some sort of narrow, parochial Boston boy who wouldn’t make much of a governor.

In the case of Emanuel, his Rolodex and the connections he brought back with him from Washington might be of considerable value to the city. Across the nation, there are concessions made and noses held, as politicians sort-of-pretend to be local boys and girls.

Ponder the odd case of U.S. Rep. Connie Mack IV, who represents southwest Florida, but is married to U.S. Rep. Mary Bono Mack from Palm Springs, Calif. What might be “local” for these two lovebirds?

To be sure, there are some folks who take the “local” thing very seriously. When the Boston Globe’s Sunday Magazine named U.S. Sen. Scott Brown “Bostonian of the Year,” a Jamaica Plain letter-writer dashed off these complaints: Brown was born in Maine, raised in Wakefield, summered in Newburyport, acquired a law degree in Newton, and lives in Wrentham. How does he get to be a “Bostonian?”

I think I’ll go visit Jane Swift and see what she thinks of all this. I renewed my passport. I’ll be fine.