by Tom Deignan

GROWING up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn as the son of a Marine-turned-NYPD beat cop, George Marlin took to politics at a very early age.

“By 1965, I was canvassing on street corners for Bill Buckley,” Marlin said this week, referring to the famous conservative columnist’s run for mayor. “We just thought he was another Irish kid who did well.”

That’s not a bad way to describe Marlin himself — an Irish kid who did well. His passion for politics eventually had him rubbing shoulders with some of the most powerful people in New York state. 

Throughout the 1990s he was the executive director of the Port Authority of New and New Jersey, a powerful post which required Marlin to oversee, among many other facilities, the World Trade Center.

These days Marlin is away from New York a couple of days a week as the chairman and COO of the Philadelphia Trust Company. But that is just, as Marlin himself puts it, his “day job.”

In the last couple of years, he has also written two fascinating books about key aspects of Irish American politics.

First up, two years back, was Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Conservative Party. This might seem like an odd project from the Irish perspective, given the long-time Irish love affair with the Democratic Party. 

But that’s just the point, Marlin suggested. The Conservative Party came to be just over 40 years ago mainly because many New York Irish were sick and tired of the Democratic Party.

One founder was Kieran O’Doherty, a graduate of CUNY’s City College of New York and longtime Forest Hills, Queens resident, whose father came to the U.S. from Co. Donegal.

There are many ways to illustrate how influential this third party became over the years. There was Buckley’s fascinating run for mayor in 1965. (Buckley, despite his snobby — dare I say British — airs, did very well among disaffected Irish Democrats in New York’s outer boroughs.) 

Then there was O’Doherty’s brother James, who made it all the way to the U.S. Senate in 1970 on the Conservative Party line. To this day, party leader Mike Long and the Conservatives are a small but powerful group in most statewide elections.

Now, Marlin has come up with a project about a much larger, much more influential voting bloc. His new book is called The American Catholic Voter: 200 Years of Political Impact.

Marlin’s book is the latest news on the controversial front of the “Catholic vote,” and how it might affect the race for the White House this year between President George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Whatever one’s take on this, Irish Americans make up a large chunk of the American Catholic vote. And so both Bush and Kerry are fighting for these votes, particularly — as Marlin noted in our interview — in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri.

“They can determine the election,” Marlin said of the Catholic voters in any of those states.

Marlin’s book ultimately traces two centuries of political behavior, one in which Irish Catholic voters play a central role. 

As for 2004, Marlin, thus far, seems inclined to give Bush the edge when it comes to Catholic voters. He notes, for example, that while Kerry (a practicing Catholic himself) has a lot of Catholic support in New York and Massachusetts, those are states Kerry was likely to carry anyway.

An important distinction in Marlin’s eyes is that the Northeast generally has a large number of so-called “cafeteria Catholics,” which is to say, those who tend to pick and choose which aspects of the faith they follow. Given Kerry’s voting record on abortion and other controversial issues, some say Kerry himself is such a Catholic.

Therefore Marlin believes the election might swing on the votes of practicing Catholics from those Rust Belt Mid-Western states.

“I think they’ll choose the next president,” said Marlin.

This issue continues to heat up. Earlier this week the Bush administration announced that it was planning to offer federal employees a “Catholic health plan.” As The New York Times put it, the plan “specifically excludes payment for contraceptives, abortion, sterilization and artificial insemination.” 

Of course, the timing of this announcement might merely be a coincidence. But coming less than two months before the election, this also seems to suggest that the battle for the Irish and other ethnic Catholic votes will be fought to the bitter end.

(Contact Sidewalks at tdeignan@irishvoice.com.)