March 17 — St. Patrick's Day — has never been an especially big day on the Republican political calendar. It's more of a feast day for Democrats in big cities that once had large Irish wards. But this Friday night, Sen. John McCain will head to New York to address the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in the City of New York.
The Friendly Sons dinner is sort of a remnant from another era — that is, the late 18th century, when it was founded. It's one of the few surviving events on the pretty much extinct all-male, white-tie dinner circuit. The Friendly Sons are largely white, generally bipartisan, lace curtain Irish, and chock-full of lawyers, bankers, and corporate CEOS. Females might be allowed in if they are, say, the Ambassador to Ireland. There are a thousand or so members of the Friendly Sons, and the waiting list is apparently forever.
Anyway, the dinner is a good way for Presidential hopefuls to attract the kind of people who can raise money for you in a city that produces more political money than any other. Which is a good bit of what passes for action at the moment on the GOP side of the 2008 presidential race. McCain, along with his probable rivals, has been spending a lot of time building financial networks in key states, all with the goal of putting together enough donors and givers and bundlers (people who put other donors together) to generate between $50 and $100 million next year.
McCain has been on something of a financial tear these last few weeks, and this dinner on Friday is a small part of that picture. TIME.com reported last month on his highly successful foray at the Republican Regents meeting in Naples, Fla., where the party's biggest donors gathered to take a look at him and other Presidential wannabes. Next week McCain is headed to a fundraiser for Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggar in California, where he can continue building his list of West Coast financial types. But this week the focus is New York. The Friendly Sons dinner isn't a fundraiser; it's more like a donor prospecting event. "In some ways, the East hasn't seen John McCain except on TV," says one McCain aide. "This is where he gets to show them that he's funny, warm, bright and worth taking a look at."
Rudy Giuliani has keynoted this event in the past. But he is skipping the event this year — which, in the view of a McCain backer, is both good news and bad news for the Arizona senator. "The good news about Rudy not coming," this source said a bit sarcastically, "is that we're totally dominating ethnic Republican politics in New York." But he added, more seriously, that McCain would actually benefit if Giuliani were in the race, because it would be easier to cast McCain as a genuine conservative instead of a more unconventional Republican maverick. "The bad news is that Rudy still isn't firmly in this race. If he were, we would have someone to the left of us to run against. But until he gets in, we don't."