They seek him here, they seek him there. Bertie is Fianna Fáil's Scarlet Pimpernel. Pity the poor media trying to keep track of him. RTÉ's Mary Wilson was taking a break from the courts to cover the campaign, but she must have felt more like a detective than a journalist.
She gave evidence to Cathal Mac Coille on Morning Ireland about the frustrations of pursuing the Taoiseach through the midlands. She and her colleagues started in Ashbourne, Co Meath, and were told to link up with Bertie in Navan. But when Navan Man eventually arrived, it emerged that he had stopped off at Trim and Summerhill on the way.
"This is a slick operation," Ms Wilson said. Slick maybe, but not always smart. Bertie met members of the Meath football team but out of sight of the media pack, thereby losing a neat photo-opportunity.
The next official stop was Mullingar but, wising up fast, the media correctly guessed he would drop into Kells beforehand. Sure enough, there was Our Bertie accepting the plaudits of the faithful at a Fianna Fáil rally in a nightclub called The Vibe.
On our screens we see Bertie, barrelling along in his inimitable sailor's walk, seemingly determined to shake every hand of every non-journalist from Malin Head to Mizen Head and Artane to Ahascragh. Ms Wilson described Ahern's entourage: "They like to go to shopping-centres, press the flesh, in one door, out the other, hardly pausing for breath. Bertie Ahern shakes every hand. If he has missed a hand, a handler will have the hand waiting for him as he walks along. Nothing going unnoticed by Ahern and his handlers, as he walks around."
Friends of Bertie explained the Theory of the Handshake to me once, during a Donegal by-election. Very roughly paraphrased, it goes as follows: Joe Bloggs goes to shopping centre to buy four pounds of mince. He sees a crowd gathered, discovers the Taoiseach is passing through. The Bloggs right hand reaches out and makes contact with the famous Ahern mitt. Later in the evening, Joe arrives home to his wife.
Mrs Bloggs: Did you meet anyone when you were out, Joe?
Joe Bloggs: Aye surely, didn't I meet the Taoiseach himself?
Mrs B: Were you talking to him at all?
Joe: No, but I shook his hand.
Come election day, in the privacy of the polling booth, Joe's hand is drawn as though by some higher power to mark No 1 beside the name of the Fianna Fáil candidate. That's assuming the theory works. Like some Third World potentate, Bertie is reaching over the heads of the media to communicate directly with the voters. The ubiquitous Ahern posters contribute to the atmosphere of a benign and paternalistic African dictatorship.
The new Dublin station, NewsTalk 106, reported Pat Rabbitte of Labour complaining that the Taoiseach's visage was "more in evidence this month than Kylie Minogue's backside".
On TV3, editor-turned-broadcaster Damien Kiberd accused Fianna Fáil of engaging in "Joe Stalin-like hagiography".
Others are even muttering the name of Romania's Ceausescu, formerly associated with the "Stickies". Some faces are more popular than others, of course. TV3 reported that Dick Roche, one of the Fianna Fáil candidates in Wicklow, had almost 800 posters torn down in a single night. They take their politics seriously in that part of the world.