Obama’s a Contender

THE decision of Senator Barack Obama to enter the presidential race will have huge repercussions across the political scale. The most directly affected will be former Senator John Edwards, who had hoped to have the left wing of the party to himself and to run an insurgency campaign against Senator Hillary Clinton and others.

Paradoxically, Obama’s entry into the race may help Clinton, who can run to the moderate center and have Obama and Edwards scrap over the progressive vote.

The Obama candidacy also brings back into center focus the Daley family in Chicago, who are key behind the scenes advisors to him.

Bill Daley was Al Gore’s campaign chairman in 2000 as well as Bill Clinton’s commerce secretary. He has been a key advisor to Obama during his brief time in the Senate and is generally regarded as a cool and experienced hand who can plot an effective way forward for the nomination.

Likewise, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley will now be a key player. Daley has stayed out of presidential politics in the main and has tended to his local patch, but he was instrumental in creating the Obama phenomenon when he urged the then state senator to run for the Senate back in 2004.

On Irish issues, Obama has been a steady vote for supporting the peace process. He has been outspoken on the need for immigration reform and has argued for the Kennedy/McCain bill which he supported when it went through the senate.

Tancredo Also Jumps In

CONGRESSMAN Tom Tancredo is the direct opposite of Obama. The Colorado representative must consider himself the unluckiest politician in America today. On Tuesday he announced his presidential run, the same day as Obama did, thereby losing all hope of coverage for his race.

Let’s hope it is an indicator of where his campaign is headed. Tancredo is the most anti-immigrant of any of the House members who oppose Kennedy/McCain, and he will be a one note candidate when he runs.

He is capable of hate filed rhetoric about immigrants and has become a lightning rod on the issue. He seems unfazed by the fact that many anti-immigrant candidates lost their races in the recent House elections, and that the Hispanic vote deserted the GOP in droves.

Tancredo believes that his message will resonate, but it is hard to see it playing a huge role in early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where illegal immigration is not a major issue.

However, his candidacy once again points up the fact that the sooner the issue is dealt with the better. With Tancredo in the field there is bound to be lots of heated rhetoric on the subject during the campaign proper.

Given that the first debates for 2008 are expected to begin in February –- yes, February of 2007 — it is obvious that the sooner the immigration reform package can be put together the better.

Clinton on Ireland

“IT was just completely overwhelming. I don’t know if in my life I’ll ever have a couple of days like that again.”

That’s President Bill Clinton talking recently to his friend and chief fundraiser Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, about his first trip to Ireland in late 1995.

McAuliffe recounts the story of the Irish trip in his new book What a Party, which goes over his role as a key advisor and money man for the Clintons during a turbulent period in American politics.

The Irish trip stood out for McAuliffe too, especially the historic rally outside Belfast City Hall where Clinton became the first ever US president to speak in Northern Ireland.

“You stood there in front of Belfast City Hall and looked out at the sea of more than 100,000 Irish all inching towards the president with that surging magnetic force you see every once in a while at a great rock concert…but it was more magical than that and really took your breath away,” McAuliffe writes.

Little wonder, as McAuliffe points out, that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd stated that the Irish had given Clinton “the two best days of his presidency.”

Ervine’s Huge Funeral

IT was really an extraordinary scene at the funeral of David Ervine last week, the Loyalist leader who was eulogized by every side after his untimely death at age 53 from a heart attack and stroke.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams and leaders of the Ulster Volunteer Force shared the space in the graveyard to say farewell to Ervine, whose work on behalf of the peace process has only really come into focus since his death.

Ervine attracted mourners from all sides of the political spectrum, so much so that Belfast was at a standstill for his burial. The Irish and British governments and all the major party leaders — with the very obvious exception of Ian Paisley — showed up.

Ervine was always very critical of Paisley, believing that he turned on and off the sectarian rhetoric which inflamed working class Loyalists, and then stepped away from all responsibility when violence occurred.

His huge funeral was a fitting tribute to an extraordinary man.