by Tom deignan

LAST week, the New York Post’s Fred Dicker filed a column about “yet another top aide to Governor Pataki” who “decided to cash in on his government ties and lobby state government.”

But with the passing of Ronald Reagan this week, this item actually sheds a bright light on the way Reagan reshaped American politics, especially among the Irish, and even in New York, where Republicans had a tough time winning two decades back.

The focus of the Post column was Pataki’s appointments officer, Patrick McCarthy, who was soon to resign and join a powerhouse lobbying firm. 

The Post noted “other top Pataki aides and advisers already cashing in on their government ties are…Thomas Doherty, and Pataki’s former communications director, Michael McKeon.”

Both Doherty and McKeon work for a lobbying firm founded by another longtime Pataki ally Kieran Mahoney. 

John O’Mara, the former head of the “Pataki-controlled Public Service Commission and the governor’s current adviser on key Indian land-claim issues” is also a partner at a top lobbying firm.

One hundred years ago, New York political types with names such as O’Mara, Mahoney and Doherty would obviously have been Tammany Hall Democrats. The machine had been good to the Irish going back to The Famine.

By and large the Irish remained loyal Democrats, from the election of FDR in 1932 through the election of JFK in 1960.

Of course, things began to change as the 1960s spun out of control. 

That transformation of the American political scene was not complete until the 1980 election. And Ronald Reagan, as well as Irish American Catholics, played a huge role in that transformation.

Say what you will about Ronald Reagan, about his personality and policies. But any criticism of Reagan – and there are many fair ones that can be made – must also deal with the fact that both of his electoral victories were resounding ones. To simply dismiss Reagan as either a smooth-talking lightweight or saber-rattling cowboy is to fail to deal with the fact that he was hugely popular with many voters.

Among the most important voters were so-called “Reagan Democrats.”

Typically, “Reagan Democrats” were depicted as mid-Western factory workers who were hit hard by the economic downturns of the 1970s.

But Irish Americans were key “Reagan Democrats” as well. Why? In some ways it was a “perfect storm” of factors which led many Irish Catholics to vote Republican for the first time in their lives in 1980.

By this time most New York Irish had left the ethnic enclaves, many for the suburbs of Long Island or upstate New York, of for similar areas outside Philadelphia, Chicago and even notoriously liberal Boston.

The Democrats had helped the Irish whether to storm of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and to come into some prosperity by the late 1960s.

Yet the well-documented instability of the 1960s and 1970s was shocking to many Irish Americans. Reagan tapped into that with his call for renewed American optimism, and a belief that America could be a proud leader on the world stage once again.

Go ahead. Smirk at such sentiments. It was the mistake Reagan’s critics always made.

He simply went ahead and won New York state in both 1980 and 1984.

In 1996, journalist and author Samuel G. Freedman discovered that the Irish were such a big part of the “Reagan Democrat” movement that he based a large chunk of his important book The Inheritance on this fact.

The book’s subtitle says it all: “How Three Families Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond.”

In the book, Freedman looked at three generations of the Irish American Carey family, who prayed at the alter of FDR in the 1930s, yet by 1980 believed Ronald Reagan was the right man for the right time.

Among those interviewed by Freedman was Tim Carey. Fittingly enough, these days, Carey is a top official with the Battery Parks City Authority and a close ally of Governor George Pataki.

Among Carey’s most notable accomplishments? Helping to plan, build and open the poignant, much-praised Great Hunger memorial in downtown Manhattan.

Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan@irishvoice.com.