President O'Bama is really -- no, really, really -- Irish. Maureen O' Blarney reports on the president's wholly joyful and successful visit. Could anyone not Irish at heart respond so enthusiastically and generously to the welcome he was given?
In Ireland, all had been ebullient. Barry O’ kissed and hugged with abandon, totally out of character for him. He waved a hurling stick and playfully threatened to bring it back to paddle Congressional foes. He cuddled babies, kissed grannies and chatted up a mom who was home making spaghetti when her daughter thrust a cellphone at the president.
He basked in the glow of adoring distant relatives in Moneygall, like “long-lost” eighth cousin Henry Healy whom the president dubbed Henry the Eighth, and a crowd of 25,000 Dubliners, many young and all thrilled, in College Green.
... Funnily enough, Obama had to take a foreign trip to seem less foreign to Americans. Even though he did a best-selling memoir about his roots, he has had a persistent and puzzling problem coming across as rooted.
Stop for a moment. Consider how many of us (me, too) could easily find we have an ancestor in common with the president. For many, this may be the first bridge they actually feel -- and can document -- spanning the distance between black and white, between European and non-European Americans in the US.
A surprising number of Americans still find the president exotic and existentially detached, falsely believing he’s either a Muslim or foreign born. Just before his trip, he gave in to the demands of Donald Trump and other birthers to release his long-form birth certificate.
But with American reporters swarming Moneygall to examine and show off the long-form birth records of Obama’s ancestor Fulmouth Kearney, a shoemaker who immigrated to Ohio in 1850, the president suddenly seems more rooted in an ethnic working-class persona that even his critics can recognize.
On the streets and at the pub in Moneygall (still smelling of fresh paint) and again at his big speech in Dublin when he offered the Gaelic version of “Yes We Can” — “Is Feidir Linn” — Obama was transformed. He dropped his diffident debutante act. He liberally offered all the Irish charm, wit and warmth that he had lacked in working-class bars and neighborhoods when he lost primaries to Hillary in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana in 2008.
I heard someone this morning carping about the president "draining a pint of the black stuff." Tut, Tut. We really should check that critic's birth certificate. No beer allowed? The critic must be an observant Muslim.
