THE LUCK OF THE IRISH

The President was in Ireland last May reaffirming his Irish roots. He visited the tiny town of Moneygall in County Offaly.  It had been the home of his great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney.  Perhaps it’s his Irish heritage that explains the phenomenal luck that has over the past two decades taken him from Chicago to Springfield, to the Senate and now the White House.

His first opportunity to seek elective office came in 1994 when Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer announced she would vacate her seat.

Obama and four others filed for the seat in 1995. But, as luck would have it, one of them withdrew and the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners disqualified the other three. Unopposed for the nomination, Obama won the general election with 82% of the vote in the heavily Black district on the Southside of Chicago.

Although he was twice reelected to the State Senate, Obama’s legislative record in Springfield was meager. Perhaps best remembered is the fact that 129 times he voted “present”, rather than aye or nay on legislation.

The best way to understand his lackluster record as a State Senator is to realize that his real agenda was to seek higher office.  In 1999, not long after taking office as a state senator, he announced his candidacy for the U.S. House seat then held by Bobby Rush.  That effort failed. 

But Obama never lost sight of his goal to move up.  In July of 2002, 21 months before the upcoming Primary election, he launched his bid for the U.S. Senate seat then held by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. 

As luck would have it, in 2004 Fitzgerald chose not to seek reelection.  Obama handily won the Democratic nomination and Jack Ryan won the GOP nomination.  Then Lady Luck struck again. Within three months Ryan withdrew from the race, as a sex scandal overwhelmed him. Three months later the Illinois Republican State Central Committee selected former diplomat Alan Keyes, a carpetbagger from Maryland, as a token replacement.  Obama annihilated him.

Within two years after having been sworn into the U.S. Senate, Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency.  From then until he won the White House in 2008 he was on the campaign trail. He was a Senator in name only.

However, he needed a lot more luck and he got it.  Few expected that his candidacy was more than a place marker for the future.  After all, Senator Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination seemed inevitable. But Clinton’s hubris and her failure to campaign in the caucus states put her in an unrecoverable position.

Having secured the nomination, Obama then caught the best break of all, running against a Republican party that had destroyed itself over the preceding eight years of the Bush Administration.  The country was fed up with Bush’s war in Iraq and the economic bubble had burst.

His campaign brilliantly promised to change the way Washington works.  That promise was stillborn. The economy, while improving, is still dangerously fragile.  Millions remain unemployed.  His Afghan surge strategy has not worked.  The structural debt that threatens America’s economic future grows worse. We are nowhere on issues like energy independence, immigration reform and tax reform. And remember that during his first two years as President, the Democrats controlled all of the levers of power in Washington.

Previous Administrations facing these kinds of headwinds have been sent packing by the American people.  Think Hoover in 32, Nixon in 60, Ford in 76, Carter in 80, and Bush in 92.

Incredibly, Obama has mastered politics, but has never taken the time to learn how to govern.  Neither the bully pulpit nor Capitol Hill works like a University of Chicago lecture hall. 

So is his house of cards about to crumble?  Perhaps.  But you can’t beat somebody with nobody, and the Republican Party is now racing toward oblivion at light speed.  Obliterated by the voters in 2006 and 2008, the GOP has reinvented itself by charging to the far right. The Tea Party leads this suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade.  Can you imagine what Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan would say about the transmogrification of the GOP?

When the votes are tabulated this November, a jubilant Obama should invite the Tea Party to the White House and thank them.  For them it will be condign punishment.  That’s a task he’s up to.

Two years ago President Obama told Diane Sawyer on ABC World News, “I’d rather be a really good one-term President, than a mediocre two-term President”. The truth is that Barack Obama has never had a good first term.

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