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.