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Except for my 93-year-old father and his fast-vanishing cronies, hardly anyone is alive who remembers New York Gov. Al Smith’s run for the Presidency 80 years ago this summer.
When it came to religion and church-going, Mr. Smith was no model for altar boys, no threat to upstage the Pope of the day, or maybe even find the nearest Catholic church.
Don’t Bet Your Hat
Still he wore his Catholicism as overtly as his shopworn brown derby. All that Catholics cared about during the summer and autumn of 1928 was that he had a decent chance to become the first Catholic President of the United States.
Republican and Democratic Catholics turned out the vote. Fighting firce anti-Catholicism, it didn’t matter how many Catholics voted.
Mr. Hoover vacuumed Mr. Smith, reducing him to Aflac feathers. The landslide outcome embarrassed the Democrats and Catholics of all political beliefs.
The next seven Presidential elections were won, as all previous ones had been, by white Protestant men.
It was 32 years before ethnicity returned to a White House race. When Jack Kennedy, a nominal Catholic who found his religion tantalizingly marketable, ran on the Democratic ticket in 1960, against Richard Nixon, Catholics mobilized again. This time they were better organized.
Still, Mr. Kennedy needed the votes of thousands of dead Chicagoans, whose ballots Mayor Richard Daley just happened to have handy in a dusty desk drawer, to swing the election away from Mr. Nixon, who drew only living voters.
White House ethnicity took another holiday until the turn of the century. Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, ran, and just as quickly he became the quickly forgotten Vice Presidential candidate alongside Al Gore.
Little Movement
This race did not require much maneuvering by fellow Jews at the polls because 80 percent of Jews commonly vote Democratic.
When coldly calculating Barack Obama officially clinched the Democratic nomination this afternoon, it was, arguably, the greatest moment in the history of American black culture since Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation 145 years ago.
Unless you suffer from flights of daffiness, don’t you wish, just a little, that at this moment you were black, that you could share in the jubilation that every American black feels coursing through his liberated body?
Even if you don’t, I do.
However, I believe that 5 months from tomorrow Mr. McCain will defeat Mr. Obama regardless of whether Hillary plays her way onto the Vice Presidential ticket or returns to her more natural role as the long suffering wife.
If I were black, I am fairly confident I would be swept up into the tumultuous momentum that says “He’s black, he’s ours,” even though common sense tells me that L.A. City Councilman Bill Rosendahl has achieved more in Marina del Rey in the last two years than Mr. Obama has in all of his political career in the Illinois state Legislature and the U.S. Congress.
Heaven Forbid, a Hurricane
A sickly child of 3 could blow over the extremely submissive Mr. Obama’s wispy resume, it is so thin.
He has gotten fabulous mileage out of his carefully stitched work as a “community organizer.” But let me warn you, pal. Don’t come home tonight and tell your wife you have given up your day job to become a “community organizer.”
I agree with those pundits who argue rationally that superior experience or a fat resume will make that candidate a more desirable President. That theory has been regularly disproven.
From the time his wife brought him into the embarrassing church in Chicago to elevate his political profile, Mr. Obama’s political career has been plotted with only goals, not accomplishments, in mind.
Surely American voters are smart enough to see through his empty-pouch career, aren’t they?
