Press and Sun-Bulletin from Binghamton, New York • 13

May 13, 2008 VIEW Press Sun-Bulletin 5B Both sides battle for soul of Democratic Party In "dream for the U.S. Anglo governor. point paign, cal expressed that, ics Star a point ranks lawmakers include That I consider soon-to-end dential Barack tics of tion." Part 2002, the Texas of Democratic Party ran a other ticket" a Latino governor, an African-American for Senate, and an for lieutenant At one during the cama white politiscience professor his concern with demographchanging, the Lone State might get to where the of Democratic whether white liberals and so-called progressives in the Democratic Party have progressed enough to allow African-Americans, and other people of color, to advance from supporting cast to center stage. There is no question that the party owes AfricanAmericans a debt of gratitude for helping elect Democrats in local, state and federal RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR. Commentary would no longer races since the 1960 campaign, whites.

when John F. Kennedy helped story comes to mind as break what had been a recent twists in the Republican stranglehold on Democratic presi- black support by getting the nomination fight, what Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. reObama calls the "poli- leased from jail. division and distrac- Today, nearly 50 years later, the only question is whether of that is the question Democrats will pay up by re jecting the rationalizations offered up by Hillary Clinton partisans that Obama, the candidate with the most delegates, the most victories and the most cash on hand, can't win because his support is not broad enough.

Clinton and her supporters rely on euphemisms about how Obama can't win over "blue collar" voters, as if there are no blue-collar AfricanAmericans. But the message is clear and based on an uncomfortable truth: If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee as now seems likely there are a sizable number of white Democrats who say they won't back him. What we've been watching isn't just the process of a party choosing its nominee. That would be too easy. It's a party trying to live up to its values, and that's not always easy.

In The Associated Press In this April 1943 file photo, a group of Jews is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers. Polish social worker Irena Sendler, who is credited with rescuing 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis during the Holocaust, has died. Irena Sendler, 98, saved 2,500 Jewish children from Holocaust WARSAW, Poland -Irena Sendler credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets died Monday, her family said. She was 98. Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.

President Lech Kaczynski expressed "great regret" over Sender's death, calling her "extremely brave" and "an exceptional person." In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sender's name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city's welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto. Seeking to save the ghetto's children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents. Records show that Sender's team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation i in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps. "Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory," Sendler said in a letter to the fact, at times in this campaign, it has been quite messy. To see just how messy, consider what happened last week during CNN's election night coverage when political analysts Donna Brazile and Paul Begala got into a verbal smackdown.

It started when Brazile, an undeclared superdelegate who leans toward Obama, mentioned something about there being a revitalized Democratic Party. Begala, who supports Clinton, took that to mean that "working-class whites" would no longer be welcomed. A frustrated Brazile insisted that wasn't what she meant. Begala pressed on that Democrats "cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans" or, as he called it, "the Dukakis coalition, which carried 10 states and gave us four years of the first George Bush." The winning formula, Begala said, was to do what President Clinton did in two elections and reach out to "working-class white folks and Latinos," something he insisted that Hillary has proved she can do but Obama hasn't. Brazile reminded Begala that, over the years, she has gone into plenty of workingclass neighborhoods to campaign for Democrats and "drank more beers with Joe Six-Pack, Jane Six-Pack and everybody else than most white Democrats." What was crucial, she said, was to not divide us up into all these groups with code words such as blue-collar voters.

Begala dug himself in deeper by suggesting that "the only way to win this in my party is to stitch together white folks, and African-Americans, and Latinos and Asians." "What do you mean my party?" responded Brazile angrily. "It's our party, Paul," she said. "Don't say my party! It's our party." There it is. That's the key to understanding the ObamaClinton battle now coming to an end has much to do with the sort of liberal condescension Begala displayed, as it does with the indignation Brazile showed in countering him. The way I interpreted the exchange, Brazile was insulted by the suggestion that a party she has worked for her entire professional life belongs to some people but not others.

African-Americans have long supported the Democratic Party. Should Obama become the nominee, we'll learn if Democrats are willing to return the favor. ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com Irish author Nuala O'Faolain dies of lung cancer at age 68 IRENA SENDLER IN 2007 Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007. In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families most of whom perished in the Nazis' death camps Sendler wrote the children's real names on slips of paper that she kept at home. When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate's yard.

Some 2,500 names were recorded. "It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child," Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler's team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. "Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come." Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo. The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive.

Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body but she refused to betray her team. "I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity," she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska's biography, "Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler." Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a The Associated Press 0'FAOLAIN DUBLIN, Ireland Nuala O'Faolain a journalist and feminist who gained international fame with her outspoken 1996 memoir "Are You Somebody?" has died of lung cancer, weeks after revealing her illness on state radio. She was 68. She died Friday at a hospice in south Dublin and will be cremated today after a Catholic Mass, her family said.

0'FAOLAIN O'Faolain emphasized during her April 12 radio interview that she had no faith in the afterlife, and instead rued the imminent loss of her lifetime's accrual of education, friends and experience. O'Faolain, who was a University College Dublin lecturer in literature before becoming one of Ireland's bestknown journalists, said the lung cancer had spread to her liver, and brain tumors had ruined her ability to concentrate. "Beauty means nothingto me anymore. Itried to read (Marcel) Proust again recently, but it has gone the magic has gone. It amazed me how quickly my life turned black," she said in the 2001 WINDOWS CHOICE 2007 READER'S READERS CHOICE AWARDS Another Quality Job THE WINDOW BROKER 607-798-9954 Custom Vinyl Windows, Doors, Decks, Docks, Patio Enclosures.

DREAMSPACE: Colleen Jones Owner 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Readers Choice Award Windows Siding Roofing Free Courteous In Home Estimates (607) 798-9954 735 Main St. wide-ranging, deeply reflective interview with state radio RTE. The broadcast inspired a national discussion about how Ireland cares for its terminally ill and a wave of sympathy for O'Faolain over her uncompromising account of her desolation. O'Faolain said she was consoled only by the knowledge that so many other people died in much more horrific circumstances. "In my time, which is mostly the 20th century, people have died horribly in Auschwitz, in Darfur, or are dying of starvation or dying multiply raped in the Congo horribly like that.

I think how comfortably I am dying, I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, Ihave money," she said. "There is nothing much wrong with me, except I am dying." O'Faolain worked as a television producer and reporter for the British Broadcasting Corp. and RTE, and gained a national readership as an Irish Times columnist starting in the mid-1980s. She became a best-selling author on both sides of the Atlantic in 1996 with the publication of "Are You Somebody?" It was initially intended to be a collection of her Irish Times columns, but evolved into an unusually intimate, even risque memoir. In it, she recounted her tough family upbringing with a philandering father and alcoholic mother, descent into her own alcohol abuse, and a lifetime struggle to attain professional, social and sexual fulfillment.

The book, which initially had a print run of just 1,500 copies, touched a particular nerve among adult female readers because of its exploration of the soul-searching of a middle-aged, unmarried, childless woman. It caused headlines at home because of her candid admission to having a lengthy lesbian affair with a prominent Irish journalist, later identified as Northern Irish civil rights activist Nell McCafferty. O'Faolain had several longtime relationships, with McCafferty and with prominent male artists and intellectuals, but never married or had children, a frequent theme in her writing. She is survived by five sisters and a brother. Two other brothers predeceased her.

The Associated Press bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work. After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued. "A great person has died a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak," Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marek Eldeman told TVN24 television. In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics.

Poland's communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983. Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Sender's "courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind." Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland until recent years. She came to the world's attention in 2000 when a group of schoolgirls from Uniontown, wrote a short play about her called "Life in a Jar." It went on to garner international attention, and has been performed more than 200 times in the United States, Canada and Poland. Sendler, born Irena Krzyzanowska, said she lived according to her physician father's teachings, arguing that "people can be only divided into good or bad; their race, religion, nationality don't matter." She married Mieczyslaw Sendler but they divorced after the war's end. Sendler then married fellow underground activist Stefan Zgrzembski, and they had two sons and a daughter.

One son died a few days after birth. The second son, Adam, died of heart failure in 1999. Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughter. Hummingbirds are here! Are you missing them? Wild Birds Unlimited 800 Valley Plaza Johnson City, NY 2770-4920 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd Ithaca, NY 2266-7425 Feeders Optics Audio Guides Books Nature Gifts 316621 Johnson City, NY E-MAIL: WHEN EXPERIENCE COUNTS Put Your Dreams In 328071 The Hands Of An Expert. (607)725-7867 (607) 754-2600 CRS, GRI ASSOCIATE BROKER CAMILLE LINK Realty Introducing The Rechargeable from EarQ No Worries.

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