OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
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It’s Ohireland!

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Both the Irish American Democrats and Irish American Republicans converged on the lakeside city last weekend and early this week as John McCain and Barack Obama pulled out all the stops to secure a win in the Buckeye State, one of the critical “battleground” states in the presidential contest.
McCain was in Cleveland Monday while Obama was in Canton, a little over a hundred miles away.
“We’re all heading for Ohio,” Grant Lally of the Irish American Republicans told the Echo Monday shortly before boarding a flight for Cleveland.
Lally was following in the wake of a number of Democrats, including Congressman Joe Crowley, a co-chair of the congressional Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs, who had attended a rally for Obama in Cleveland last Friday night.
The rally, organized by Washington, D.C.-based Stella O’Leary of the Irish American Democrats, was followed by members of the group canvassing Irish-American voters in the city on Saturday.
Cleveland has a significant Irish-American population and close to ten percent of Ohio’s population claims Irish ancestry. The Almanac of American politics puts the precise figure at 9.5 percent.
The Irish American Democrats were also staging rallies in Omaha, Nebraska and Detroit, Michigan this week and both the IAD and IAR are working to maximize support for the presidential candidates in Pennsylvania, which has a population that is 11.8 percent Irish American, according to the almanac.
Pennsylvania has been visited time and again by Obama and McCain and their support groups and Senator McCain chose Scranton in the eastern part of the state as the place to address the Irish American Presidential Forum last month.
Indeed, the focus on the two states has irked at least one candidate. Jim Russell, a Republican who is battling to unseat Democratic congresswoman Nita Lowey in New York’s eighteenth congressional district, which includes parts of Westchester and heavily-Irish Rockland County, has ridiculed Obama and McCain for seemingly “running for the presidency of Ohio, Pennsylvania and states other than New York.”
Be that as it may, the focus of the campaigns on Ohio and Pennsylvania and the view that the fate of the presidency hinges on voters there merely underlines the sense that Irish-American votes will be pivotal next Tuesday.

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