US: Baltimore's mayor quoted Kavanagh as he chased after gubernatorial votes, writes Denis Staunton, in Columbia, Maryland.
It's late afternoon and Martin O'Malley is halfway through his campaigning day, moving briskly through the November chill as he knocks on doors in a brand new suburb, hunting for votes in tomorrow's contest to become governor of Maryland.
Some of O'Malley's staff are flagging but the 43-year-old mayor of Baltimore is bounding along the almost empty streets, quoting Patrick Kavanagh's Raglan Road as he goes.
"On Grafton Street in November/ we tripped lightly along the ledge/ of a deep ravine where can be seen/ the worth of passions pledge," he chants.
With his traditional Irish band, O'Malley's March, his bright green campaign bus and James Joyce quotations on his website, O'Malley may be the most overtly Irish-American major politician since the Kennedys. A rising star in the Democratic Party, he was the only mayor invited to address the party's 2004 convention and has been touted as a future presidential candidate.
First he must win tomorrow's election and although O'Malley has led Republican incumbent Bob Ehrlich in polls since July, the race has tightened in recent days. Addressing campaign volunteers at a community hall in suburban Columbia, O'Malley tells them the contest is about using the power of government to improve society instead of trying to reduce its role to a minimum.
"Bob Ehrlich, if you can't make our government work for us, give it back to us," he says, to roars of approval.
O'Malley is running on his record in Baltimore, a predominantly African- American city with one of the highest crime rates in the US and some of the worst schools. As mayor, O'Malley has reduced violent crime by 40 per cent, although he has failed to cut the murder rate as drastically as he promised and has made some progress in improving education.
While races for House and Senate seats have been dominated by Iraq and the Bush administration's record, the 36 gubernatorial elections tomorrow are more focused on economic issues.
"What this race is really about is this clash between the notion that we're some sort of market-driven crowd, pushed by forces beyond our control in the global economy, and this swing back to unchecked monopolies and the malefactors of concentrated wealth, the likes of which we haven't seen since the days of Teddy Roosevelt.
O'Malley believes that, since President George Bush's re-election in 2004, America has undergone a political transformation driven by disillusionment with the Iraq war and the shocking scenes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
"To watch for five days on television, when all the network news cameras could get into the Superdome in New Orleans and it took the US army two, three, four, five days to respond, that was a very history-changing moment in the American psyche."
The son of an Irish-American father and a German-American mother, O'Malley grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, listening to the Clancy Brothers as a child and developing an early interest in Irish history and culture.
"It was the music that gave me an awareness of the history. Then, when I was in high school, I devoured every book in the Rockville library on Irish history and Ireland.
"That coincided with my getting involved with other guys in the school forming a band. Seven full-time Irish bars meant there was a need for Irish music seven days a week and only five full-time bands. So we hit the supply demand curve at the right time. We only knew 20 songs but we'd do them twice in the one night and they kept paying us to play and get better."
Irish America's record on race relations is a mixed one but O'Malley maintains his knowledge of Irish history has helped him to empathise with the experience of African-Americans.
"I do think that awareness and that knowledge is part of the reason why I've been able to be far more of a coalition builder, a consensus builder, communicator, healer, even as a minority mayor in a majority African-American city. We all have a sense of empathy but the Irish experience and an awareness of that history, I believe in retrospect, was a big help," he says.
After he became mayor of Baltimore, some local business figures advised O'Malley to disband O'Malley's March, warning that a singing, guitar-playing mayor could not retain popular respect. But he continued to play about once a month and although some of his staff flinch at the prospect, he sees nothing wrong with the thought of continuing to perform if he becomes governor.