THE O'BAMA THING....

THE O'BAMA THING. Barack Obama has joked for years that people in Chicago voted for him because they thought his name was "O'Bama." Now comes word in The New York Sun that he does, in fact, have Irish ancestry:

So it turns out, the Daily Telegraph reports from Dublin, that Barack Obama's great-great-great-great grandfather was " Joseph Kearney, a well-to-do shoemaker from Moneygall, County Offaly, Ireland, who lived from 1794 to 1861." Reports the Telegraph, "The presidential candidate comes from an Irish Anglican family, many of whom emigrated to the New World around the time of the famine and Ireland's decimated potato crop in the 1840s." Irish radio reported earlier this spring that while much has been made of Obama's Kenyan roots, little has been made of his Irish ancestry. The radio network's Web site reported that the Obama forbear "sailed from Ireland to New York in 1850 at the age of 19 on the S.S. Marmion arriving on the 20th of March.

This gives a whole new flavor to the O'Bama shamrock buttons the campaign developed for Saint Patrick's Day.

--Garance Franke-Ruta