[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.

Dr. James Ottavio Castagnera - 8/23/2008

Can you see her? Judy Garland in her red shoes, clicking her heels and repeating the mantra: “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” Voila! She wakes up in her very own little bed in her very own little shack out on her very own little Kansas farm, surrounded by family and farm hands, all safe and sound. Kitsch doesn’t get any more All-American than that.
What would happen, do you think, if John McCain clicked his heels together and mumbled, “There’s no place like home”? Apparently he might wake up in any one of about eight different places. I’ll bet none of the eight is located in Kansas.
Obama hopes to make political hay out of McCain’s inability to remember exactly how many houses he has. This is reminiscent of the elder George Bush’s expression of amazement about bar codes in a local supermarket during the 1992 campaign. Both gaffs make the candidate seem out of touch.
Obama boasts of having only one home. He hasn’t mentioned that his crib set him back a reported $1.65 million. That amount just about equaled the Obamas’ combined income for the year they made the purchase. The Chicago Tribune reported in November 2006, “They were drawn to a 96-year-old Georgian revival home that has four fireplaces, glass-door bookcases fashioned from Honduran mahogany, and a 1,000-bottle wine cellar, according to real estate listings and an interview.”
Obama’s book deals and his wife’s $300,000 a year vice presidency with Chicago University Hospitals together accounted for their seven-figure gross annual income.
Well, heck, Olympian Mike Phelps is expected to gross $30 million in product endorsements during the year ahead. So what’s the big deal about Obama and spouse pulling down $1.67 mil? Phelps no doubt will start accumulating real estate, too.
Meanwhile, he’s taking some heat for adding Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes to his list of clients. Writes one web pundit, “The deal has earned Phelps harsh criticism from some doctors, such as nutritionist Rebecca Solomon of Mount Sanai Medical Center. In a Daily News article posted this morning, Solomon said, ‘I would not consider Frosted Flakes the food of an Olympian.’ That's the understatement of the day. I would consider Frosted Flakes to be the food of a generation of obese, diabetic, ADHD kids who need real role models they can follow, not sellout junk food promoters who trade fame for unethical profits.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/023914.html)
This guy’s rap on fatties reminds me of the last time McCain got into trouble, but not for anything he said. A McCain advisor, Phil Gramm, created the flap by calling America “a nation of whiners.” Well, sorry folks, but I tend to agree that the overweight whiner has become an American archetype. If the shoe fits (and the pants don’t), I say wear it.
But let’s stop whining for a minute here and take a reality break. McCain is rich. Obama is rich. Even a kid, whose only apparent distinction is the ability to move from one end of a swimming pool to the other faster than anybody else, is rich. If you’re rich, too, then more power to you.
The simple truth is, ain’t no poor folks likely to run for president, or senator, or most any other important post. The last poor president, I guess, was Harry Truman. As a sitting U.S. Senator seeking reelection, Truman sometimes slept in his car while on the campaign trail. Once upon a time he had gone bankrupt. When his term in the White House was over, he and wife Bess moved back to the home in Independence Missouri that they had shared for years with her mother.
They just don’t make ‘em like old Harry any more, folks. Senator Obama may play the “poor mouth” card against Senator McCain, but in reality his feet are just as firmly planted on the Yellow Brick Road as are his opponent’s.
[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University. He is writing his 14th book, about terrorism’s impact on higher education, for Praeger.]