A Betting Woman.(The Talk of the Town)(Jean Kennedy Smith)

After Barack Obama won the Presidency, Jean Kennedy Smith--the eighth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children, who had supported Obama, despite having served as Ambassador to Ireland under Bill Clinton--had some celebrating to do. She chatted with her brother Teddy. She revelled with some close friends. Eventually, she fished a scrap of paper out of her wallet and dialled a number scrawled on it, which connected her to a Washington, D.C., cabdriver named Jean Claude Excellent.

Excellent was dropping off a fare at Dulles when his cell phone rang. The other day from his cab, with the open-door alert chiming in the background, he recalled, "She said, 'Do you remember the lady--?' and I said, 'Who lady?' and she said, 'The lady you take, remember we talk about Obama win or not going to win?' and I said, 'Oh, yes!' "

"I sure do remember you," Excellent went on. "I told all my friends, 'How'd that lady know? How was she so sure Obama was going to win?' "

Excellent and Smith had met only once, in January of last year. It was just after the Iowa caucuses, and Smith, who lives in New York, was in Washington for a board meeting at the Kennedy Center. Coming out of the Watergate, she got into Excellent's cab.

"You know when you're the cabdriver and people ask you a question?" Excellent said. "She asked, 'Which candidate do you like?' And I said, 'Oh, probably Mrs. Clinton.' And then after that she said, 'I think Obama can be President.' I said, 'What? I don't think we're able to see that.' "

Smith recalled, "I came out of the Watergate, and I said, 'It looks like our man's going to win,' and he said, 'Oh, no, I don't think so,' and I said, 'Oh, yes, he is,' and he said, 'No, he ain't.' "

"Look, I'll give you a hundred dollars if he doesn't win, ...