For the past two weeks (the campaign ends tomorrow), Fine Gael, which holds its ard fheis next weekend, has run billboard commercials focusing on its leader, Enda Kenny. At 230 sites around the State, posters with pictures of Kenny have blazed one of two ads: "It's time for the truth in politics. For a change." or "I'll put you first." with that "you" emphasised by being italicised.
This campaign has reportedly cost about €150,000. Fine Gael's website tells us that in speaking about it, Kenny has said: "Truth is where politics begins and ends. But politics and government have been seriously debased by the current administration. I'm offering something completely different: the truth in politics, for a change. Politics that puts the people first."
Kenny, like his party's ads, speaks, not in full sentences but in fragments, it appears. Well, most people do, but that's hardly reason enough to transfer the practice to posters across the State. Anyway, even allowing that the poster with "For a change." as a stand-alone sentence may now be an acceptable form of ad-speak, what can these ads mean?
In one of the posters - the "I'll put you first" one - Kenny is not wearing a jacket. Instead, he is in a crisp white shirt which makes him look more like an ad for Daz than for the Dáil. It's a typical American politician's pose, although it also has a limited currency this side of the Atlantic. He was wise not to have worn a blue shirt. But the white shirt is a mistake too.
Presumably, as in the US, it's supposed to connote busyness - the white collar man with the best blue collar attitude to hard work. So many American politicians wear these crisp white shirts without jackets (but with ties, as Kenny has done) that it's a kind of uniform, as the blue shirt with the white collar (and yellow tie) is the uniform of the portentous businessman.
The problem is that evoking images of American politicians is not, at present, the wisest way to proceed in Ireland. Most people here dread the prospect of further Bushification of Irish politics. At a time when a huge chunk of the electorate is tired of the Fianna Fáil glic boys - nodding and winking and tiresomely doing their "cute hoor" routines - Fine Gael should be able to capitalise.
Even the length of time that Bertie Ahern, his party cronies and his increasingly authoritarian Pee Dee ones too, have been in power should be easily exploitable. Fine Gael, though clearly not the force it once was and looking like it's in inexorable decline, ought to be able to do far better than offer pathetically clichéd images and equally clichéd phrases.
Even if it's true that Enda Kenny will tell the truth about politics or put you first (when the truth is that the political campaign is designed to get you to put him first) these phrases are not only dead, they're decomposed. Do you know any adult of sound mind who could believe these Fine Gael statements? Fianna Fáil is no better, but has the excuse that power has corrupted it.
In opposition, Fine Gael should be ravenous. Untainted by power, the party has not had to perform the kind of abject cute hoor wriggling of Fianna Fáil over, say, the Bush attack on Iraq. Had it been in power, of course Fine Gael would have been no better, but it was in opposition. Now, to win back lost ground, it peddles the most banal phrases and inappropriate pictures.
Perhaps I've got it all wrong. Maybe there's a kind of volcanic banality - an explosive transformation about to erupt - in Enda Kenny's posters. It might be the Superman-as-Clark-Kent trick but it's hard to see it. The saddest aspect of all this is that the lot of almost everybody in a democratic state is improved by a dynamic opposition.
Instead, we are offered the most vacuous guff. There must be tens of thousands of largely conservative voters, for whom the Civil War politics of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are not determining. Such people will not vote for Labour and certainly won't vote further left. The current coalition Government has browned off many such voters who genuinely want to see a change.
Yet Fine Gael seems incapable of winning over such people. "Truth is where politics begins and ends," says Enda Kenny. What does that mean, when most people believe that politics is where truth ends? "I want people to see that I'm in politics to serve them, to make their lives work better, to give their children a bright, safe future," he adds.
No doubt you do, Enda, no doubt you do! But people are not going to believe that about you - even if it's true - so long as you insist on bombarding them with vacuous clichés and silly pictures. It all sounds too derivative, too unauthentic, too much like a sad political ad. It lacks the spark of life, of hope (albeit severely restricted) that people want. It's dead.
Much more of this, and Fine Gael will be too. Ireland would be poorer for its passing.