President Obama to visit Ireland

I wonder how this is going to play out back here in the states. Will the African American community push for him to visit his family in Africa? Will the Irish community embrace him now as one of their own and recommit to his Presidency? Will it have any impact at all? Only tiime will tell.

When President Barack Obama slipped into an Irish pub Monday to hoist a Guinness, he was thousands of miles away from his real audience: the white ethnic voters back in America who abandoned Democrats in November.

Obama’s one-hour jaunt to meet distant Irish relatives in the tiny town of Moneygall could pay big political dividends for a president who only recently muff
In American political terms, this is the message targeted at the Reagan Democrats in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio: Obama, the first black president, is more like you than you ever realized. He’s the descendent of European immigrants — an Irishman, no less, named Falmouth Kearny — one of millions of Americans who can trace their roots to the great migrations of the 19th century.

It’s a parallel narrative to the dominant storyline about his heritage, the self-described son of the Pacific, born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and Kansan mother and reared for several years in Indonesia. The unorthodox mix fueled a subculture that openly asked: Who exactly is Barack Obama?

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