Word: dinners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This year's Al Smith Dinner - the annual gala that raises funds for the Archdiocese of New York and has become an essential social ticket for the city's political and media class - will be remembered as a rare cease-fire moment in the heated 2008 presidential campaign. Exchanging rolled-up shirt sleeves for white ties, John McCain and Barack Obama cracked each other up on topics that usually result in outraged press statements when raised on the campaign trail. "I got my name, Barack, from my father," deadpanned Obama, "and I got my middle name from somebody who obviously...
...perhaps no surprise that the Al Smith Dinner, which gives candidates the chance to hobnob with Catholic opinion leaders just weeks before an election, became what Theodore White called "a ritual of American politics." John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were the first contenders for the White House to share the dais at the event in 1960. Over the next two decades it was a standard campaign stop, a light-hearted evening to honor the memory of the first Catholic to win a major party's presidential nomination...
...Democrats - started in 1980. The Roe v. Wade decision had elevated the political importance of abortion, and while Catholics tentatively supported Jimmy Carter in 1976, they soon determined he was not the pro-life politician they had assumed. When Carter appeared with Ronald Reagan at the Al Smith Dinner, the crowd embraced the GOP challenger with warm applause. Carter was booed...
...York's newly-appointed Archbishop John O'Connor had already spent much of his short time in the position taking on the state's two most prominent Catholic Democrats: Governor Mario Cuomo and Vice Presidential-nominee Geraldine Ferraro. By the time the dinner rolled along, tensions between the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party had become so strained that the Democratic nominee Walter Mondale simply skipped the event. Reagan attended alone and, on Election Day, captured 61% of Catholic voters, the largest share that any Republican presidential candidate had ever earned. No GOP candidate has matched it since...
...undergraduate at Georgetown University. And it was compounded by the fact that in 1992, O'Connor invited Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey to be the featured speaker. The pro-life Catholic Democrat had himself been denied a speaking slot at that summer's Democratic National Convention and the dinner arrangements were seen as payback...