[Jim Castagnera, formerly of Jim Thorpe, is the Associate Provost and Associate Legal Counsel at Rider University. His books are available at www.lulu.com.]

My stomach is more distended than usual. I’ve just eaten a big plate full of crow. In January 2007 in this space I predicted that Barack Obama was a mere flash in the pan. As I write this, some 17 months hence, he is the Democratic nominee-apparent. As such, he is for African-Americans what either Al Smith or John Kennedy was for Catholics: he is destined to be either the first African-American to run for president of the United States, losing but preparing the ground for the next black candidate to win… or he himself will be the first black American president. We’ll find out in November.

If he runs and loses, he will be black America’s Al Smith. Alfred Emmanuel Smith, Jr. was born in late December 1873 on New York’s polyglot Lower East Side. He was, like me, a classic American mutt… Irish, German, Italian and English. He identified most closely with the Big Apple’s Irish community. He was only 13 when his dad, a Civil War veteran and trucker, died. He quit Catholic school at 14 and never got a high school diploma. His first job was in the city’s Fulton Fish Market for $12 a week.

In his early twenties he landed a clerk’s job with the Commissioner of Jurors. His first elected post at age 30 was as a member of the New York State Assembly. By 1911 he was chairman of the Assembly’s potent Ways and Means Committee. He was elected the sheriff of New York County in 1915. In 1918, aided by the Tammany Hall machine, he was elected governor of the Empire State. This feat put him in the history books as New York’s first Irish-Catholic chief executive.

During the 1920s the Republican Party was ascendant. It rode to and remained in power on the pinnacle of the economic boom that helped the Roaring Twenties roar. In 1928, that bubble was still a year away from bursting. Smith became the first Catholic to win the presidential nomination from one of the country’s two major parties. Prefiguring Obama’s appeal to African-Americans and young voters, Smith brought to the polls millions of ethnic Catholics who had never bothered to vote in the past. All the same, anti-Catholic sentiment, a North-South Democratic split on the future of Prohibition, and the general national prosperity combined to sweep Republican opponent Herbert Hoover into the White House by a landslide.

Fast forward three decades: Irish Catholic Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy is elected president in 1960. Wealthy and a war hero, handsome and Harvard educated, he had all these advantages over Smith, as well as the passage of time with all its social changes. The Civil Rights Movement was well underway. So were the Sixties, a decade now renowned for its social and cultural changes, most of them in reaction to the perceived political blandness and moral bleakness of the Eisenhower Fifties.

Despite all these advantages, Kennedy’s election was no slam-dunk. A child of 13 in 1963, I remember my eighth-grade nun opining to my class that it would be best if Kennedy lost. Otherwise, “everything that goes wrong will be blamed on us Catholics.” Kennedy had to beat his Anglo opponents in the West Virginia primary in order to prove that, in contrast to Smith 32 years earlier, he could attract white Southern-Protestant votes. He could. Still he won by only 100,000 popular votes. Some say that Irish-Catholic Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and Kennedy running-mate Lyndon Johnson of Texas finagled the votes needed to put the Democratic ticket over the top.

Last January I demonstrated how flimsy are my political predictions. Still, I’ll take another (cautious) shot here. Safe to say, I think, that neither Obama nor McCain will win by a landslide in November. To that extent, at least, Obama will not follow in Al Smith’s footsteps. Whether he will squeak out a win, like Kennedy, or suffer a narrow defeat… well, your guess is as good as, or maybe better than, mine. One more thing I can safely say: this election is going to be, as it already has been, history-making and damned interesting, too.