On an historic win, political eloquence and Pinkerton thugs

Barack Obama’s victory represents the most dramatic ascent to the White House in this nation’s history. We’ve heard about humble births in "log cabins" before, but this is of a quite different order.

In that regard, Irish Americans know all about Al Smith’s failed bid for the White House, which was redeemed by Kennedy’s successful campaign 32 years later. (This morning Menachem Rosensaft made a similar case about RFK and Obama in the Huffington Post. Click here)

However, as someone said of the result in November 1960: it proved that any boy in America could grow up to be president –- as long as his daddy had $400 million.

JFK's was one of the great American success stories. He was, nevertheless, 3 generations from the emigrant ship. Obama's father, in contrast, was foreign born, and we have to go back to Andrew Jackson for the last first-generation American to be elected president.

Obama, of course, has been linked not just to JFK, but also Reagan, FDR and Lincoln, transformative presidents who’ve used eloquence as a weapon.

People who talked about all this being somehow empty talk simply missed the point on a number of levels and really didn’t much understand American history. Historians, when evaluating and ranking presidents, generally factor in their ability to communicate with the U.S. electorate and, in a couple of cases, people in the world beyond.

I’ve always liked Hillary Clinton and respected the real John McCain (the one we saw last night). But I was first intrigued by the promise of Obama’s candidacy about 18 months ago. It was only when I got the opportunity to go to New Hampshire for the last days of the primary there in early January that I heard first-hand the intellectual underpinnings of the call for change. I wrote an op-ed about that a couple of weeks later. Click here

I also saw a brilliant politician at work in the Granite State. Obama's stump speech in primaries spoke of the various obstacles Americans had overcome over the generations and how they didn’t give up when they faced, for instance, the “Pinkerton thugs,” a reference to the detective agency and all private police forces that beat down workers from the Molly Maguire era onwards. This was an instance of how his populism, in its pitch to the base, was so much more effective than John Edwards’s.

My maternal grandfather was jailed during a strike in Dublin many decades ago. Actually, he was the “thug” in this instance, as he was convicted of assaulting a strikebreaker passing a picket. He was released back into the world after a few weeks. But such things linger for a couple of generations. And so, Obama’s reference to workers’ struggles in the past (even though I’d guessed it wouldn’t reappear in an inauguration speech) helped close the deal for me.

AP poll shows massive conversion to evangelical Christianity

A poll released today by the Associated Press seems to indicate that the number of people identifying as evangelical Christians has almost doubled in four years. However, cynics have questioned the poll’s science because it also suggests that the presidential race between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain is tightening considerably –with the former having a 44 to 43 percent edge, which is well within the statistical margin of error, but rather different from the 10-point and more margins in Obama's favor indicated by most other surveys. The AP said that 43 percent of likely voters polled said they were evangelical Christians. The number of those who voted in 2004 who claimed that label was 23 percent, according to exit polls. The critics say that the close relationship between the AP’s owners and McCain might have something to do with this jump. Oh, surely not? Haven’t these people ever heard of the power of faith?

Irish to forefront of GOP revolt

When the Republican convention was still in the first flush of excitement over Sarah Palin, two veteran party supporters made their views known on a cable news show. Actually, they thought the show, or at least their participation in it, was finished.

“It’s over,” said Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan (the pair are pictured above back in the 1980s) said in the famous “hot mic” incident. What was “over” apparently was the election, because of John McCain’s tapping of Palin to be his running mate.

Agreeing with her was strategist Mike Murphy. The latter for good measure used words like “cynical” and “gimmicky” about the pick.

Well, Palin wowed the convention with her speech, touching off her short-lived honeymoon. Meanwhile, an embarrassed Noonan said her words were misconstrued. Since then, however, she has joined the chorus of criticism directed at the Alaska governor’s candidacy, saying it’s a “mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism.”

Let’s add to that the defection of Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist of the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004.

Dowd said on a Time Warner Summit panel that McCain “knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk. He knows that."

The strategist’s disillusionment with the Bush presidency and the Iraq war has been well publicized. And although he still works for Republican candidates, he did say back in April 2007 that Barack Obama was the only one of the declared candidates that he liked.

Obama, of course, has been remarkably successful in attracting Republicans. Among the most interesting are sisters-in-law Susan Eisenhower, the president’s granddaughter who spoke at the Democratic Convention, and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the younger daughter of Richard Nixon, who has donated $2,300 to the Obama campaign.

Remembering Danny Cassidy

I’m saddened to hear just now about the death of Danny Cassidy who wrote an Irish language column over the past year or so for the Echo. Danny, as it happened, was one of the main movers behind the Irish Writers and Artists for Obama, a group that nailed its colors to the mast with a full-page ad in the paper during the primary season.

I suppose I’ll always remember one thing about Danny – he defied the preconceptions I’d had about him before I met him.

Let me explain. I’d had no interaction with the scholar before he spoke that night with writer Peter Quinn at the Tenement Museum. Certain things I’d heard and read, though, suggested someone rather wacky and eccentric, and perhaps very cranky. This had nothing and yet everything to do with his thesis about the development of American slang.

Nothing in the sense that I was agnostic on the question, but enough people I respect thought his ideas very plausible and even convincing.

Everything in the sense that to push such a theory against the conventional wisdom one had to have been mildly eccentric at the very least -- as so many innovators and theorists have been.

Such a quality tends, however, to be accentuated in our electronic age. It turned out, indeed, that it was Danny’s emails that were a little wacky, or could be, not the man himself.

In person, I found him tremendously likeable and charming, as well as intelligent in an understated way. To my great regret, that first meeting was to be the last.

My own subsequent email correspondence with Danny only reinforced my new opinion – he was a great guy.

Danny, you’re gone too soon, way too soon.

Kooks enter the mainstream

There’s nothing quite as boring as morning-after coverage of a presidential debate that you’ve seen. So this morning I listened more intently to reports from the campaign trail, like the interesting one about Sarah Palin’s energizing the Republican base. (Note: The post has yesterday's date on it because the image was uploaded Tuesday night).

One woman interviewed at a rally yesterday in Florida said she was “excited about [Palin], but also scared.”

One thought perhaps that her enthusiasm for someone who others see as hopelessly out of her depth might be tempered with a dash of realism. Would Palin, for instance, be able to take on the onerous duties of the presidency at a moment’s notice?

Well, that's not quite what the woman meant. It was the Democratic candidate that troubled her sleep. “He scares the bejesus out of me,” she said frankly.

That’s the least of it. In recent days reporters have heard and television crews have recorded riled-up voters at Republican campaign events shout “terrorist,” “kill him” and “treason.”

It was Samuel Johnson who said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It’s also, he might have added, the last recourse for the desperate. As Barack Obama builds a lead in the polls in the campaign’s final weeks, the xenophobic and racially-coded rhetoric from the other side has gotten increasingly dangerous.

There was a time when questioning a major-party candidate’s patriotism and commitment to the constitution was beyond the pale. But recent days have seen a barrage of attacks against Obama by the top and bottom halves of the GOP ticket that do precisely that.

Undoubtedly one factor at work here is the far-right fringe, which has become rather more mainstream over the decades.

A half century ago, John F. Kennedy didn’t have to face the kooks and lunatics until after he was elected.

JFK told one right-wing newspaper publisher visiting the White House that was an easy thing to call for war, but rather harder to send young men off to fight it. The publisher in question owned the Dallas Morning News. That was the paper that when the president visited Texas ran a full-page ad accusing him of treason, among other things. Some blamed the publisher’s nephew for accepting the ad (he was temporarily in charge of the News), but its contents weren’t that much different from the paper’s editorial position. In any case, the president left Dallas in a coffin.

Sober commentators who believed that Oswald, and Oswald alone, shot Kennedy, suggested that the atmosphere in that bastion of the radical right pushed him over the edge.

Fast forward 45 years to Fox News’ Sean Hannity. His “Hannity’s America” on Sunday night advanced the view that Obama’s community organizing in Chicago was actually about overthrowing the federal government.

The main source in this “documentary” was one Andy Martin, who was introduced as an “internet journalist.”

The watchdog group Media Matters for America has a little more background on Martin – like his Selective Service record from 1973, which refers to his “moderately-severe character defect manifested by well documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character."

Also well documented is Martin’s long history of anti-Semitic pronouncements. Media Matters reports in this regard that he called a judge a “slimy, crooked Jew.” A real charmer, obviously, is Hannity's source.

But then Hannity, who boasts an Irish Catholic background, had no problem with “Obama Nation” author Jerome Corsi’s history of anti-Catholic comments. (Nor, hardly surprisingly at this point, did William Donohue of the Catholic League.)

A gap is growing, though, between right-wing commentators like the syndicated Charles Krauthammer and the likes of Hannity. And maybe that’s a hopeful sign. In a column a few days ago, Krauthammer quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. saying that FDR had “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.'" The right-wing columnist added that Obama has “got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."

Veep roots

Historian Mary Lee Dunn has a very interesting opinion piece in this week's Echo -- it's available on the web site homepage and on the page 8 of the print and digital editions. Dunn is the author of "Ballykilcline Rising: From Famine Ireland to Immigrant America," published over the summer by the University of Massachusetts Press. It's been referred to as a companion book to Robert Scally's "The End of Hidden Ireland." about the same part of the world, around Strokestown, Co. Roscommon. The area is well served by recent Famine literature. Last year, Peter Duffy's "The Killing of Major Denis Mahon" was published to fine reviews.

Dunn's research and article makes the case for placing Sarah Palin's Irish ancestors, via her Sheeran grandmother, in Kilglass, which is adjacent to Ballykilcline. This is rather troubling for me, as my paternal grandmother was from that corner of County Roscommon, and my grandfather was born just a few miles away. So if Dunn is correct, then it's likely I'm much more closely related to her than the average Alaskan voter.

Joe Biden, who debated Palin in St. Louis last night, has long identified as Irish American. It puts him in a rather different category to both Palin and Obama, whose Irish roots while verifiable, are still remote and mostly a curiosity.

Biden, being Catholic for one thing, is much more a product of white ethnic America. And like many in that category, he consciously emphasizes one aspect of a mixed heritage (English is the other one that's usually cited in his case).

This is a phenomenon that was studied some years back by Harvard sociologist Mary Waters who interviewed 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-generation American Catholics for her book "Ethnic Options." She was interested in how and why they played up certain aspects of their ethnic background and minimized others.

The Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee always refers to himself as Irish Catholic -- just Al Smith was always seen as Irish, though he was very much a mix of ethnicities. Biden alluded to his Irishness by introducing his mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, at his convention speech. He didn't mention her name in last night's debate when referring to her, but I think you were supposed to know she was Irish when he quoted her saying: "God love him, but he's wrong."

Sebelius's great-grandmother

During the summer, as the veep stakes were heating up, the Wall Street Journal named a Democratic shortlist of seven. Sen. Hillary Clinton was one, and Evan Bayh, who was a long-time favorite to get the nod, was another. The other five were Catholic, the WSJ pointed out. They were: Senators Jack Reed, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, and Governors Kathleen Sebelius and Tim Kaine. The Irish Echo added that the five were all Irish-American.

A week or so later, I wrote a piece making the case for Kansas’ Sebelius, who is the daughter of former Ohio Governor Jack Gilligan. Just before the DNC met, of course, one of the short-listed “Irish” was picked. At the convention itself, one of these pols managed to link their family history to actual immigrants. Here is the second paragraph of Governor Sebelius's keynote speech at the Pepsi center.

“I'm a descendent of Irish immigrants. My great-grandmother worked as a maid in the home of William Howard Taft, before he became president. Decades later, the grandson of the president and my father, the grandson of the maid, served back-to-back to represent the same district in Congress. Now, that is the American dream. It's my story, and it's the story of millions of others. Last night we heard Barack Obama's story -- how the son of a single mother from Kansas, through hard work and perseverance, has come within reach of the White House. Barack Obama was raised by a family of pragmatic, hard-working Kansans who believe in faith, in family and in community.”

Calling all O'Reilly twins

The Irish Echo would love to hear from any O'Reilly twins (or even triplets) out there. What do you think of John McCain's joke? Being O'Reillys and twins and Irish do you feel triply insulted?

Debate is back on

Apparently Senator John McCain will debate tonight, after all, so it's safe to resume the blog. Meanwhile the president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians who met McCain at the Scranton event on Monday has written him a letter protesting the "O'Reilly twins" joke. For more information click on the comment from Massachusetts on Tuesday's post on the forum.

Crisis

This blog has been suspended because of the severe financial crisis facing the nation, and the weather's not great either.

Irish forum? What? Here?

So finally after 24 years, a Republican candidate has made it to an Irish presidential forum. It happened yesterday in Scranton and you can read editor Ray O’Hanlon’s report from the scene in tomorrow’s Irish Echo. But it would seem that a condition had to be met before this milestone could happen and that was -- the forum could double as a GOP rally.

Several notable Irish figures in the area only learned of the event when contacted by media outlets.

"This is the first I've heard of it," the president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackwanna County John Keeler told the Scranton Times-Tribune. "I wish [John] McCain well, but I'm kind of on the other side. I know Joe Biden and I've met him several times."

Scranton’s Mayor Chris Doherty was not invited either, the paper reported.

Some naysayers might argue that that you can have a forum and you can have a rally, but you can't have both at the same time, even if you call the latter a "townhall" meeting.

Those who did make it, including the national media, were treated to McCain's one Irish joke. The one about the O'Reilly twins. And he told it again later in the day. It's a real knee-slapper involving drunks. But I don't want to spoil it in case you find yourself at a townhall meeting anytime soon.

City pols are just as qualified

There are some, no doubt, who feel that New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn would make a fine presidential or vice-presidential candidate. Well, why not? In the context of Sarah Palin’s emergence from obscurity, the same could be said of any number of politicians here. Adolfo Carrion Jr., for example, who spoke at the recent Irish Echo event at Museum of the City of New York, has gained considerable executive experience since 2001 as borough president of the Bronx -- which has 1.3 million residents.

The GOP vice-presidential candidate took over as the governor of Alaska in December 2006. That’s no mean achievement in any life story, to be sure. But given that she’s the Republicans’ choice to be Dick Cheney’s successor as vice-president, that aspect of her resume seems more than a little skinny. So, the GOP has made much of her previous experience as a mayor. And the media has been very respectful of that, not wishing to be seen to denigrate small-town America. In his recent interview with Palin, ABC’s Charles Gibson repeatedly referred to Wasilla as a city, which is perhaps technically what it is. But it has a fraction the population of most neighborhoods in New York. And Alaska itself, though a huge landmass with the Russian bear apparently breathing down its neck, has rather less people than four of New York City’s five boroughs.

Wasilla had, according to the last census, just over 5,000 residents, though an estimate in 2007 put that figure at just short of 10,000. Compare that with a few neighborhoods in New York that Irish Echo readers are very familiar with. Woodside, which might be the best known, had in the 2000 census 90,200 (including this writer at the time); Astoria 43,605; Sunnyside 29,808; and Maspeth 35,498. At the tip of Manhattan, that once-solidly Irish enclave Inwood had 9,238 people, roughly what Wasilla is said to have now. We don’t have current population estimates for these neighborhoods, but all saw their star rise considerably during this decade’s property boom.

Can anybody argue that a local politician from Astoria, Sunnyside and Woodside -- which has more than 160,000 souls in the most ethnically diverse patch of land on the planet -- would be any less qualified or better equipped to deal with America’s problems than a small-town mayor?

Gov. Swiftboat should apologize

The Sun, the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, was sued in the early 1990s by one of Britain's most durable actors for daring to suggest that he was dull.

The article quoted someone saying that William Roache was as boring in real life as Ken Barlow, the mild-mannered character he'd been playing for decades, and still plays, on the TV soap “Coronation Street.” It seems ludicrous, but he won his libel case and was awarded £50,000 in damages. (But because Roache had turned down that same amount in a proposed out-of-court settlement, he had to pay costs. He later declared bankruptcy.)

People in this country have a lot more leeway about what they can and cannot say about a public figure and that’s often held up as an example of America’s freedom. Come election time, though, the use of character assassination is habitual and often quite shocking.

And if it seems to be getting worse, that’s because it is. The Orwellian endeavors of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, for example, could not have had the same impact in a less technologically sophisticated age.

See what happened during last week’s “lipstick” flap. Former acting Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift condemned the Democratic candidate’s “disgraceful comments comparing our vice-presidential nominee, Governor Palin, to a pig.”

She demanded that Barack Obama apologize to Sarah Palin. Actually, given that her ridiculous comments were heard in newscasts on scores of TV stations and reprinted in hundreds of newspapers nationwide, it’s the former acting governor who should apologize to the Illinois senator and his family.

Obama has been surrounded by strong women throughout his life and is married to a confident and accomplished woman with whom he is raising two daughters. He has acted with decorum and grace throughout a long grueling campaign. So to baldly state that he would refer to a woman, or indeed anybody, as a pig is nothing short of character assassination.

Come to think of it, why would one jump to that conclusion about any politician without first investigating the circumstances? Nobody criticized John McCain when he used the same phrase about Hillary Clinton’s health-care policy; nor did anyone bat an eyelid when some of Hillary’s own supporters chanted it after party bosses hammered out a compromise on the placing of Michigan and Florida convention delegates.

Swift began to backtrack the following day – something that, unsurprisingly, was not widely reported. "I can't know if it was aimed at Governor Palin," she said on MSNBC on day 2 of the controversy, but continued to assert that Obama was responsible for words that might be misconstrued. (Obama, who is preoccupied with other things, might have seen Palin’s RNC speech once, but Republicans seem to think that her zingers were roiling around in his head like a tune he couldn’t get rid of. So when he said “lipstick,” well…it was too much of coincidence, wasn’t it? At the weekend, Dr. Karl Rove, that well-known Freudian psychologist, said it was “unconscious.”)

Swift, a member of the McCain’s “Palin Truth Squad,” said in that MSNBC interview that she “used to be” in politics. At least when she was in electoral politics, she was accountable to the voters. During her short reign in Massachusetts (2001-2003) her approval ratings sank below 10 percent at one stage, making her the most unpopular person ever to hold the office.

In Swift’s new role in the Republican propaganda machine, there are no negative consequences for her personally nor is there any real accountability. As long as she’s helping to deflect people from the actual issues, then she’s doing a fine job.

Palin quoted writer who wanted FDR and Bobby Kennedy dead

Thomas Frank, the author of “What's the Matter with Kansas?” and currently a Wall Street Journal columnist, has spotted that Palin's speechwriters quoted a notorious right-wing journalist in her convention address. She said: "A writer observed: 'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.'"

The writer in fact was Westbrook Pegler who once said he was sorry that an assassin had missed Franklin Roosevelt (in Miami in 1933) and killed instead the mayor of Chicago who was sitting beside him.

Click here for Frank's column in in the WSJ.

However, he doesn’t mention that Pegler said something even worse about Robert Kennedy before his assassination. Thurston Clarke reported in an article in Vanity Fair earlier this year that Westbrook Pegler "welcomed the possibility that, as he put it, 'some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his [Kennedy's] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies..."

This is a reminder, perhaps, that the extolling of small-town virtues often goes hand in hand with right-wing populism and indeed right-wing extremism.

Scary Spice joins fray

I like to think there are lots of Republicans whose idea of the perfect ticket is Jerry Ford and Bob Dole (which it was in '76). There are certainly a few who’ve come out squarely for Barack Obama, like President Eisenhower’s granddaughter, a speaker at the Democratic Convention. Maybe a few more of that type will emerge, unhappy with the 2008 GOP ticket, which seems like one half of an edition of the reality show “Wife Swap.” Most of America, I’m sure, would tune into to see the other end of that episode: Cindy McCain hanging out with Todd Palin up in Wasilla. Certainly so far, the ratings for this drama have been very good. Polls have revealed a significant shift amongst white women in favor of the Republican ticket. That was the first of two interesting items of Palin-related news that emerged yesterday (well three if you count the revelation that the Alaska governor has claimed travel expenses while at home).

Nobody can seriously argue that McCain’s choice wasn’t reckless and irresponsible, not least because this so-called “maverick” (I haven’t seen anybody point out yet that mavericks generally aren’t leaders) has sold his soul to the most reactionary wing of his party. If he’s elected, he'll owe them.

Now the duo’s handlers are using the Richard Nixon playbook by having as little unscripted interaction with the media as is possible. Nixon –- who was one of most intelligent men to occupy the White House and also, at least in the view of many, a paranoiac thug -- refused to have regular press conferences, which had been the practice over the previous 40 years.

Openness, of course, and talk about the freedom of the press, is essentially “elitist.” Have you noticed that elitists in this version of reality don’t live in gated communities; they don’t own seven houses, or sail in yachts, or fly private airplanes? Most of them don’t even come from millionaire families. No. Rather they’re the type that brood about people’s rights, and read books, some of which have bad words, and maybe shouldn’t be in libraries, whatever about bookstores. They’re elitist because they want to impose their egalitarian notions upon all of us. A couple of decades ago, one of those weirdly egalitarian and elitist ideas was the notion of the “career woman” who could “have it all.”

If there is a “genius” to McCain’s pick, it's its tapping into the resentments of the moment, particularly of those who are neither rich nor poor. That’s always a good place to begin any counterrevolution, and Gov. Palin may well be the perfect counterrevolutionary to oppose Obama’s revolution of hope.

The other important piece of news yesterday was the endorsement of Senator Obama by former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who backed George W. Bush’s reelection bid in 2004. Koch called Palin “scary.” Koch’s position, it's believed, might boost the Democratic candidate’s hopes in two swing states where Jewish voters can make a difference – Pennsylvania and Florida. But does Palin scare only Jews? What about the mainline Protestant and Catholics who would regard the thought of creationism being taught in our schools with horror?

The search for the perfect postcard

A request from a good friend of the Irish Echo in New York was passed on to me just before I left for the DNC. He’s a collector of sorts, I guess, for he has a political postcard sent from the Denver convention in 1908, which was the last time the Democrats met there. So naturally, he wanted one sent from the 2008 gathering, too. And I brought the appropriate stamp and began my search the day I arrived.

If election ephemera is your thing, you didn’t have to look too hard for some this past week. Most of it was focused on the Democratic nominee. One of our group said that the Colorado capital had turned into “Obama city.”

For example, a spectacular array of posters, buttons, t-shirts and just about everything else awaited the thousands who poured into the Denver dark each night after the speeches. One seller pushed his specialty item shouting: “Obama watch – Time for change.”

One of the most popular buttons of the week, however, doesn’t mention him, but instead references a gaffe made by his opponent: “Ask me how many houses I own,” it says.

Anyway, I also checked out the 16th Street Mall, a pedestrian street with lots of stalls with Obama and political material. Someone recommended Where the Buffalo Roam, a trendy store (one of a small chain) selling political t-shirts, buttons and posters, again with an Obama emphasis. Barnes & Noble didn’t have much 2008 election material, though I bought a postcard of Bobby Kennedy campaigning for Gov. Pat Brown in California in 1966.

I asked people at the DNC’s own store, which was selling Obama/Biden t-shirts the day after the running mate’s name was announced. But there were no 2008 postcards there or at any of the above-mentioned places, or at any of the stalls relating to the convention, including those promoting the city and state, set up at the Sheraton Hotel. I also went to www.democraticstuff.com where a search for postcards yielded no results.

One of the store employees I consulted said it would be “so cool” to have postcards from both the 1908 and 2008 conventions, and that was the general attitude of all of those I approached. They were sympathetic, but we couldn’t get around the fact that apparently it had occurred to no one to produce a card to mark this year’s event. (I say "apparently" because I can't, of course, say definitely that one doesn't exist.)

And I’m sorry I couldn’t oblige, though I do have lots of interesting stuff mentioning Denver and the Democratic National Convention 2008, which hopefully will be some compensation for our collector.

[Photo: Lynda Clarke and Nancy Touchette traveled from Maryland to the convention.]

A Wednesday night to remember

Wednesday night at the Pepsi center was brilliantly choreographed and was far by the most dramatic of the week to date. A journalist sitting behind me said of Bill Clinton before his speech: “He’s got to say that he [Barack Obama] is ready from day one.” It was felt by some that when making the speech of her life, that Hillary Clinton didn’t make a strong enough case for the presumptive Democratic nominee. In a CNN interview afterwards, a female African-American delegate and Hillary diehard said that there was no way she was voting for John McCain. But she still had a distance to go over the next two months with regard to Obama. Experience was the issue she cited. She said she’s always been the one to make the calls to get people out. But the positions were apparently reversed -- now they’ll have to call her.

Her view was by that point very much a minority one within Democratic ranks. Still, one could only wonder about white Hillary supporters in Ohio or Virginia or Pennsylvania. So, the former candidate's speech didn’t fully dispel the uneasiness. In fact its very success was part of the problem. And certain elements seized on that. One media outlet even interviewed a body-language expert who said that despite her happy tangerine pantsuit, the New York senator was angry.

In the lead-up to the convention there was talk that Hillary had moved on, but that Bill was said to be still absolutely seething. The critics talked about the Clintons’ constant psychodrama and how it was hijacking the entire proceedings.. It didn’t seem a good sign that Obama aides weren’t allowed input into the former president’s speech. There was better news, however, when the delegates were released and Obama was formally nominated unanimously on Wednesday afternoon. He officially became the first African-American to run on a major party ticket. Then William Jefferson Clinton --uncharacteristically on time at 7 p.m. -- emerged to ecstatic, prolonged ovation. When the speech was over, another journalist said. “That was a home run.” There was no wiggle room. Obama and his aides could not have asked for more.

Clinton used the home-run analogy himself when he said that Obama’s veep pick “was out of the park.” It turned out that it was Kerry and not Biden who chewed on McCain “like a dog with a bone” (see Celtic Tavern post for reference). When our group surveyed the night’s proceedings afterwards, a majority thought overall that Biden did very well. (One who didn’t felt that Kerry was great -- so perhaps, the veteran senators were playing good cop/bad cop on their old friend from the Republican Party.)

A big moment came when the new vice-presidential nominee introduced his mother. And Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden clearly enjoyed her moment in the spotlight [I hope to return to the Finnegan angle in a post soon].

And then Obama’s unscheduled appearance electrified the hall. It trumped the extraordinary reception given to Clinton earlier. It put an end to talk about a divided convention and psychodramas. As Ted Kennedy had said earlier in the week, the torch had again been passed on to a new generation.

Carol Wheeler, Obama liaison, reports enthusiasm

The happy party atmosphere at the Irish American Democrats event in Denver Tuesday night speaks volumes, according to Carol Wheeler, who earlier this summer was appointed as Barack Obama’s liaison with the Irish community.

“I’ve been truly encouraged by the excitement in the Irish-American community for Obama,” she said.

When people are asked if they want to help the campaign, she reports, they volunteer before the questioner even finishes their sentence.

Some of them, particularly those in the battleground states, want to express enthusiasm for the 2008 Democratic ticket via their Irish-American identity

“That’s not to say we don’t have a lot of work to do,” Wheeler added.

“A lot of people are taking a look at Barack Obama and trying to figure who this guy is,” she said. Some in that category will likely be “more comfortable” with Joe Biden. “They can relate intuitively to him,” she said. But with Obama/Biden as a package, some of that can rub off on the younger man. And then, she added, voters will see that their stories and their values are in fact remarkably similar.

“Personally I’m thrilled,” Wheeler said about the Biden choice. And from everything she’s heard on the ground in Denver, that’s the general feeling.

[PHOTO BY KA CHAN: From left, Irish Labor Party leader Eamon Gilmore T.D., the Irish Echo's Peter McDermott, and Antoine Faisal, the publisher of Aramica, a New York-based paper, pictured at the Irish American Democrats event in Denver.]

Democratic Convention opens in Denver

Denver -- The Democratic National Convention has returned to Denver after 100 years, but this time the whole world is watching.

Just about all of those attending are agreed that the stakes are much greater in this election year than they were in 1908. Certainly the numbers involved at the convention are considerably greater.

Fifteen thousand local, national and international members of the media are attending; 26,000 local volunteers are helping with convention events; 4,500 delegates are participating, and for every delegate, one can factor in at least four more family members, friends and party supporters who've turned up to be part of this uniquely American spectacle.

But the most important figure is 75.000 - the number of people expected to hear Senator Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination

on Thursday night for the presidency of the United States, thus becoming the first-ever African-American candidate for either of the major parties in the nation's history.

Meanwhile, ahead of Senator Hillary Clinton's keynote address on Tuesday evening, the New York delegation was putting its best foot forward at three packed events at Denver's Sheraton Hotel.

There was little post-primary tension evident at an early Sunday evening function held in honor of the speaker of New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver. The party atmosphere continued directly afterwards when Gov. David Paterson was in the spotlight.
The next morning Clinton herself was the guest of honor at a New York State Democratic Party breakfast, where she gave every indication that she was committed to victory in November. Before that, however, Silver kicked off the Sheraton breakfast predicting "we're are going to hear speeches [during Convention week] that will be recited for years to come.

"It's time for an extreme makeover at the White House," he added to enthusiastic applause. Then the Assembly speaker introduced the other U.S. senator for New York as a "Brooklyn boy done good."

Senator Charles Schumer said that his fellow senator led a "wonderful struggle that broke so many glass ceilings." He referred to the great racial and ethnic diversity of the New York Democratic Party and also to the fact that though the faithful was divided during the primary season, it was now united around Barack Obama. He said that Clinton was the "person who will lead the charge to take back America."

Clinton appeared finally to a rapturous reception and listed the reasons why the Republican Party should not be allowed to retain control of the White House. She then attacked the GOP ads that pitted her against Obama. She said: "I'm Hillary Clinton and I do not approve of this message."

The gathering was one of a number of events based around the convention, one of them being a reception hosted by the lobby group Irish American Demcorats.

As was the case with Clinton, another rapturous reception greeted ailing Senator Ted Kennedy when he spoke to the convention Monday night. Kennedy was introduced to the crowd waving Kennedy placards by his niece, Caroline Kennedy. In her remarks she made particular note of her uncle's efforts to end apartheid in South Africa and bring peace to Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile if the Democratic Party is using the convention to market itself, so inevitably is Denver. And two young Irish-American women raised in the Midwest and recently transplanted to the Colorado city are helping with the effort. Susan Brake promotes the Metropolitan Denver Economic Development Corporation.

The Cincinnati, Ohio, native Brake, whose family name is McGarr, relocated to the city in 2007 with her husband. She described the atmosphere in the city over recent days as "electric." Brake said that Coloradoans hoped that visitors would get a taste of the state and come back for more. One of the things that the Metropolitan Denver Economic Development Corporation wishes to promote is the city's $7 billion mass transit project, the sort of endeavor not associated with Western cities generally.

St. Paul, Minnnesota-raised Caitlin Sullivan, who works with Colorado Tourism, said that the state is ideal for those who "want to pursue an active, outdoors lifestyle." Nonetheless Sullivan added that when she and her boyfriend get married they intend to go to Ireland for their honeymoon.

[Photo: Dubliner Nuala McGovern, executive producer of WNYC's influential "The Brian Lehrer Show," with the host Brian Lehrer at Denver's Sheraton Hotel.]

Democrats and guests gather at Celtic Tavern

On the small stage at Denver’s Celtic Tavern Tuesday evening, the Irish-American Democrats’ Stella O’Leary brought on Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney to rally the troops.

O’Malley, alluding to this year’s ticket, said that African-American/Irish bonds go back to the friendship between Frederick Douglass and Daniel O’Connell in the 19th century.

The evening's more formal aspects, though, were kept to a minimum, and most of the talk took place over drinks.

Fine Gael’s Nora Owen told me she thought Hillary’s speech was “stunning.” She did all she needed to do. “She can’t be blamed if the Democrats lose the election,” said the former minister for justice.

(Earlier, at the convention hall, I heard a party supporter, a 60-something white male with a pronounced Southern accent, say at the end of the speech: “That oughtta shut ‘em up.” I presumed he was referring to recalcitrant Clinton supporters. The same man said earlier: “That Biden: he’ll chew out McCain like a dog on a bone.”)

Owen, who is a grandniece of Michael Collins, was also very impressed with Michelle Obama’s speech on Monday night. “She’s a fine woman,” she said. And like most Irish and Irish-American visitors I spoke to, she regarded Ted Kennedy’s moving speech as a convention highlight.

Eamon Gilmore, the leader of the Irish Labor Party, is attending his first U.S.
political convention. He agreed that it’s a rather different experience from his party’s annual conferences back home. But if the European Union’s socialists got together, it would be an event on a similar scale. And he revealed it could happen. The socialist party leaders, who meet regularly, have discussed the possibility of a gathering of the Continent’s mainstream left.

It was love rather than politics that brought Tallaght’s Shay Dunne to Denver two decades ago. His late wife was a native Coloradan. Dunne, who learnt his hurling at home in Dublin, is active in the local GAA. He said that the NACB championships held in the city four years ago were considered one of the most successful ever. “We showed them how to do it,” Dunne said.

What Biden means by 'clean'

Joe Biden is a popular choice with the Democratic faithful, judging by brief conversations I’ve had with political figures, delegates and party supporters over the last 48 hours. A long-time Hillary supporter, Congresswoman Nydia Valezquez, told a small group of us ethnic journalists from New York, when we spotted her on Sunday night, that the Delaware senator owned just one car, which he drove himself to the only house that he owned. (Incidentally, Valezquez, who represents the Lower East Side in New York, told me that the recent saving of St. Brigid’s Church “showed that you have to keep hope alive.”)

Nancy Touchette whom I met on Monday morning with Lynda Clarke, a fellow party supporter from Maryland, said that Biden is “right for this year.”

And it’s a popular choice with the hard-nosed commentariat. On Aug. 22, before the official announcement, the New York Times’ in-house conservative columnist David Brooks (who has said some quite nice things about the presumptive Democratic nominee) said: “Barack Obama has decided upon a vice-presidential running mate. And while I don’t know who it is as I write, for the good of the country, I hope he picked Joe Biden.”

Most Democrats believe Obama has all the qualities needed in a president, but Dan Balz in the Washington Post said he has “to show he's willing to embrace some old-fashioned ideas about what it takes to win.” His choosing Joe Biden was one important sign of his pragmatism. And there may have to be others.

Interestingly, “What it Takes,” is the title of Richard Ben Cramer’s 1992 book about the 1988 presidential campaign. He followed from the very beginning six of the candidates positioning themselves to be Ronald Reagan’s successor in the White House. They were: George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole on the Republican side, and Democrats Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, Gary Hart and Biden.

Cramer used various techniques of the new journalism genre then still very much in vogue, but his trademark was writing in the third person channeling the voices of his interviewees, whether the candidate himself, his managers and aides, or his close family members.

He had access, without which the project would not have been possible, and all of the profiles were to varying degrees sympathetic. But he had his favorites (for the most part here I’m relying on my memory, having read it more than 10 years ago).

From early on in their post-World War II marriage, Cramer revealed, Bush and his wife Barbara had sent out thank-you notes to people they’d met, and over the years had compiled an impressive database of names. This courtesy practiced on such a huge scale appeared coldly calculating in political terms. Hart, for his part, was regarded as a little strange by reporters and simply in the retelling it seemed he was for Cramer, too. (Actually, yesterday I met Raymond Jones, an African-American columnist here in Denver, which is Hart’s home patch, and he said that the former senator suffered from his typically western persona. “He’s a loner,” said Jones, who knows and admires him.) Dukakis came across as a control freak, and Dick Gerphardt was decent and wholesome, as well as stoical in the face of life’s challenges, all of which somehow made him rather bland.

But it’s Dole and Biden who emerged as the most human and also the most likeable of the six. The author’s connection to the pair continued after the book was published. Cramer, a liberal, wrote a glowing magazine portrait of Dole (for Rolling Stone, I think) when he was the Republican candidate in 1996. And he encouraged Biden to write his own memoir, “Promises to Keep.”

I haven’t seen “What it Takes” mentioned in the media so far, but Cramer’s book is bound to be a resource on Biden. When flipping through it before our group’s early-morning Sunday flight, I came across a snippet that said something about a recent Biden gaffe. A great deal of attention has been paid to his statement during the early primary campaign that Obama was “articulate” and “clean,” among other laudable things. You’re veering into eggshell territory when you say that someone from a traditionally oppressed group knows how to speak; however, he used the latter term about himself when he first ran for the Senate as a 29-year-old upstart in 1972 (if I’ve divined Cramer’s narrative technique correctly). And by “clean,” it’s obvious enough to me that he means “clean-cut” and thus potentially respectable, which is what Biden himself was -- even back in college he wore a jacket and tie to class -- when compared to many of his peers 36 years ago.

Hayden stays a 40 year course

Denver -- Forty years after the chaos of Chicago, Tom Hayden is attending the Democratic National Convention yet again, but this time not as a protest organizer, or as a delegate.

By Friday, Hayden will have made at least five appearances on panels at the Denver event.

"Conventions have been forced into uniformity in order to take advantage of the opportunity for free media," he said. "But on the ground, there is a huge richness of discussion, debate, protests [and] cross fertilization of movements."

Hayden was a lawmaker in the California State Assembly and State Senate in the years from 1982 to 2000, but he's still best remembered by some as one of the Chicago Seven, the group of antiwar leaders who were put on trial for conspiracy and inciting to riot before and during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Many felt that the activists, whose convictions were later overturned on appeal, were made scapegoats by a conservative establishment that was angry with the antiwar left.

Certainly the seven, who came from different parts of the movement, were unlikely conspirators, at least as a group. For example, the best known of them, Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman, were the co-founders of the Yippies, while Hayden was a long-time member and early president of a rather different organization, Students for a Democratic Society. He was also the author in 1962 of that group's founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement.

Hayden told the Echo this week that his ideas have remained fundamentally the same in key respects since those years. "My thoughts are consistent with the early '60s notions of a) participatory democracy as the goal, applied to the public and private sectors, and to opening up the political process," he said, "and b) the notion that change occurs through the agency of social movements which begin on the outside but ultimately alter the mainstream."

Hayden, who was born into an Irish-American family in Detroit in 1939, said that the "Sixties" were "caused by a new generation of young people outside the institutions around the world."

He stressed that while, for instance, President John F. Kennedy's "persona and rhetoric" contributed to the sense that change was in the air, the decade's upheavals came from below.

Hayden said: "The unusual circumstance today is that the spirit and movement of youth is rising inside a context of a presidential campaign."

He believes that "the 'Obama generation' will supply the social activism in America for the coming two or three decades regardless of whether he wins or not."
Of course Hayden, an early supporter from the party's left wing, hopes that Barack Obama does win. However, he hasn't been uncritical. He was one of about 50 well-known progressives who signed a recent open letter to the Illinois senator that, while generally positive in tone, said "there have been troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign."

It ends with the line: "Stand firm on the principles you have so compellingly articulated, and you may succeed in bringing this country the change you've encouraged us to believe is possible."

Asked by the Echo if there have been positive changes specifically in the political process since the Chicago convention 40 years ago, Hayden said: "Yes, of course. Immediately after 1968, the Democrats changed their presidential primary system to a bottom-up model. Half the delegates were required to be women, the draft was ended, the 18-year-old vote established, etc. On a cultural level, a much greater acceptance of diversity exploded in the mainstream."

That tumultuous era has still much to teach later generations, he said.

"The key is to read the primary literature and view the countless documentaries that enable us to understand the '60s," he said.

But he said it is sometimes a big challenge putting the "'60s radicalism into an understandable context of the extremities our generation faced, like the military draft for a war that couldn't be won."

In a similar vein when asked if he'd do anything differently, Hayden replied: "You can't go back to an earlier context."

Anarchists, rioting police and an Arab-American at the Democratic Convention

I'm in Denver with a delegation from the New York Community Media Alliance. One of our number, Antoine Faisal, who is Lebanese, was on his way to an Arab-American comedy show on Monday afternoon when, near the Sheraton Hotel, he found himself in the middle of a confrontation between young anarchist protestors and riot police.
Faisal is a publisher and writer for a New York-based paper, but he originally trained as a photojournalist, and his instincts kicked in. A few minutes into the incident, he was pepper sprayed by a policeman despite saying he was press and showing his badge. He was hit in the eyes, but held onto the camera, and focused it on himself, taking pictures of his agony and of the efforts of bystanders to help him.

He shared the images with members of our group. His story will likely get some coverage as a producer for public radio and a New York Times reporter have been covering our trip.

After relaying his story in detail, and showing his dramatic pictures to us, Faisal said: "I have a surprise for you." He'd been on his way from a panel discussion and, it turned out, had inadvertently left his tape recorder on. So, he also had a dramatic audio recording of the incident.

He described himself as a person who is generally sympathetic to police but said of these officers: "They don't honor or deserve the uniform they are wearing.
"As a journalist, I was doing my job. I wasn't threatening them. I didn't cross any lines. This is why we have press credentials." .

He recalled the pain as the worst he's ever experienced, but given what has happened over the past several decades in his home city of Beirut, he said "it's nothing."

After his recovery, he went to the comedy show and took pictures there, too.


[Photo: Antoine Faisal tells his story to the New York Times and to the "Feet in 2 Worlds" radio project.]