Before he was the trailblazing Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama was an ambitious young politician who learned a valuable lesson thanks to the Chicago Irish.
The year was 1999. Obama, a state senator, announced he was going to challenge Congressman Bobby L. Rush, a legend in the working-class African-American wards of Chicago's South Side. Decades earlier, the South Side was heavily Irish. It was the world that James T. Farrell recreated in his famous Studs Lonigan trilogy of novels from the 1930s.
In fact, for all the changes in Chicago, the same rules have always applied when it comes to politics: you have to pay your dues before you challenge a veteran.
Meanwhile, though it's true that the district that Obama hoped to win was 65 percent black, it also had "several relatively affluent Irish-American neighborhoods," as The New York Times noted recently.
Obama (himself Irish on his mother's side) was ultimately trounced in the South Side race, and learned that when it came to Windy City politics, he still had some dues to pay.
Obama's loss illustrates key facts about the Chicago Irish experience. First, the Irish have been playing a crucial political role in Chicago for over 150 years. Furthermore, the Irish have always had to build coalitions among other racial, ethnic and religious groups. Often, they did so successfully, though other times, the result was tension and violence.
Either way, from Studs Lonigan, Michael Flatley and Mrs. O'Leary's infamous cow to Comiskey Park and O'Hare International Airport, the Irish have left a deep impression upon Chicago. Read the rest of Chicago and the Irish by Tom Deignan
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