Word: event
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What has gone largely unnoticed, however, is that the evening marked just the second time in 20 years that both presidential candidates had been invited to attend the gathering of Catholic elites. The event itself is a strictly nonpartisan affair. However, the question of whether the Archdiocese extends an invitation to certain candidates has produced no small amount of political drama in past election years. Obama's presence on the dais at the Waldorf-Astoria is just one sign that this may be the Democrats' best year for Catholic support in decades...
...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...
...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...
...truce seemed in sight in 2000 when O'Connor was succeeded by Cardinal Edward Egan, a prelate far less interested in making political waves. And indeed he invited Al Gore and George W. Bush to the event that fall. Just four years later, though, both Bush and John Kerry were left off the list. "The issues in this year's campaign," explained an archdiocesan spokesman then, "could provoke division and disagreement." Critics speculated that church leaders were more concerned about keeping Kerry, a pro-choice Roman Catholic, off the stage...
...Tina • •intention of to depart planet in the event of a Palin victory is announced...