Dan Moran: Brushed away by greatness

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Updated: February 27, 2012 9:50AM

When I chatted with Bob Bluth at a State of the Union “watch party” on Tuesday night, I asked if he ever watched “Arrested Development,” the cult-classic TV series that centered on the offbeat Bluth family.

He drew a blank. Possibly because his name isn’t Bob Bluth, it’s Bob Luth.

(Fans of “Arrested Development” are no doubt reminded here of the character Bob Loblaw, which when pronounced at just the right speed by Scott Baio sounded like “blah blah blah.”)

Anyway, Bob (pause) Luth, as the Deerfield resident’s last name should have been spelled in Wednesday’s edition of The News-Sun, had a classic Barack Obama story to share from when they marched together in the June 2004 Puerto Rican Parade in Chicago.

Well, technically, “marched together” isn’t completely accurate — U.S. Senate candidate Obama walked, while Luth rode on a unicycle. Luth pulled out a photo that captured one moment near Balbo and Columbus drives, showing him riding tall in the saddle next to Obama, dressed in what the political world would call parade-casual.

“There were times when I’d take a break by putting my hand on his shoulder,” Luth said with a laugh. Asked if he knew then that he was within the bubble of a future Secret Service client, Luth said he definitely took note of the Obama charisma.

“I don’t want to say that I knew he would be president some day, but there was an energy around him,” Luth said. “The crowd was chanting ‘O-bam-a, Obam-a.’ ... It was like an electricity in the air.”

For some reason, I was reminded not of my own modest Obama encounter in Waukegan, but of another occasion when I saw a man who would be president — in this case, George H.W. Bush in March 1988, the night he won the Illinois GOP primary (Pete du Pont finished a distant fifth).

At a forgotten ballroom in Chicago, after participating in a young-reporter interview with the late GOP uber-strategist Lee Atwater, I watched Bush emerge to a cheering throng kept at bay by iron railings. He did that wave Dana Carvey would later get so much mileage out of and offered his by-then-standard victory speech.

What do I remember most? That his dutiful daughter, Dorothy, stood by his side ... and looked very, very tired. Yes, some brush-with-greatness stories are more memorable than others.