To Denounce or Not to Denounce?

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Sidewalks with Tom Deignan

To Denounce or Not to Denounce?

May 15, 2008

By Tom Deignan

ANOTHER week, another politician asked to make a big choice on the public stage.

Earlier this month it was Barack Obama. After weeks bobbing and weaving when it came to the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama came out and denounced the man he’d once described as his personal minister.

Wright, of course, had made highly controversial comments about America and other touchy subjects.

Interestingly, it has been suggested that John McCain denounce the rants of one Reverend John Hagee. Hagee, who runs a megachurch in Texas and has endorsed McCain, likes to refer to the Catholic Church as “the Great Whore,” among other pleasantries. You can go on YouTube.com and see it for yourself.

Expect this to become a bigger issue when the Democrats stop beating themselves up, and the “Catholic vote” becomes ever more important in the fall.

This week, the big political drama unfolding in front of our eyes is the sordid saga of Staten Island Congressman Vito Fossella. Will he resign or won’t he, in the wake of revelations that he not only was arrested drunk driving, and not only was bailed out by a lover who is not his wife, but also had a child with this woman three years ago.

Incidentally, despite his decidedly non-Hibernian name, Fossella has Irish roots. His great grandfather was a powerful New Deal Democratic congressman named James O’Leary.

It might be another Irish American who benefits from Fossella’s swift public downfall. Though Fossella himself seems to be leaning towards staying on as congressman, and hoping the voters of Staten Island and south Brooklyn forgive him come November, party bosses seem to want him gone.

The most likely candidate to replace Fossella, should he step down? Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan. It has been reported that party elders such as former Senator Alphonse D’Amato have called Donovan to see how he’d feel about standing for Fossella’s seat.

Again, we will all have a front row seat as this drama unfolds, day by day. Or in the case of cable news, hour by hour.

Amidst all of these very public debates about who should do what, or denounce who, and why, it is interesting to note that over the decades the Irish have been at the center of many such controversies.

Let’s face it, once Tammany Hall and other big city machines rose to power, many high profile Democratic political candidates were happy to take Tammany’s money and manpower. However, that also meant defending their ties to an organization that, at times, had a fairly loose definition of politically ethical behavior.

Demagogues such as radio priest Charles Coughlin and Senator Joseph McCarthy eventually fell from grace, but not before many Irish American supporters were asked to denounce these one-time power brokers.

In more recent years, when the Troubles in Northern Ireland heated up throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, many Irish American politicians were forced to defend their alliances to Sinn Fein or other Nationalist groups.

That may not sound like such a big deal when seated in New York or Boston. But we should not forget that there are still places in the U.S. which do not look fondly upon Catholics and/or anti-British forces of resistance.

One of the most infamous episodes in presidential history involving politics, religion and the Irish, occurred during the election of 1884. Grover Cleveland was running against Republican James Blaine.

Blaine had already made himself an enemy of Irish Catholics. He was a well-known supporter of what came to be known as the Blaine Amendments, which made it clear that no public money should be used to pay for private educational purposes.

This all sounds reasonable, but everyone at the time knew that Blaine was playing to the worst anti-Catholic impulses of his time. There was such paranoia about the swift expansion of Catholic schools in American cities that Blaine worked hard to make sure the government did not help these people along in anyway.

Well, if there were any Irish Blaine supporters left, there weren’t after a reverend at a Blaine rally denounced the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.” Talk about a not-so-veiled shot at the Irish!

Blaine, of course, denounced the anti-Irish reverend. The moral of the story? He lost anyway.

(Contact Tom at tomdeignan@verizon.net)

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