Everyone in Ireland votes Democrat, don't they? Or would, if they could. Voting Democrat is like choosing between Robert de Niro and Charlton Heston. There is no choice.
Supporting the Democrats affirms a kind of Irishness; it lines you up with great leaders such as Kennedy and Clinton. You enter the same broad frame as many good writers, actors and musicians.
Tactical and historical reasons explain why so many Irish politicians support the Democratic Party agenda, but there's a deeper affinity at play. The chemistry between Democratic ideals and Irish aspirations just doesn't happen with the Republican way. It goes deeper than support for the peace process and worrying if Ireland will stay high on the US agenda.
Ronald Reagan's charisma factor was as perfumed as Bill Clinton's, as US polls reflect. But the difference in how the two were greeted when they visited Ireland couldn't have been more pronounced. Reagan faced protests against his economic policies and particularly against his foreign policy in Central and South America.
Clinton got a hero's welcome, even though Reagan's genealogy gave him a slight edge on being one of us. Not that the welcome was unqualified. Maybe it's that historic sense of being an outsider, of belonging to a minority community within a huge union like the USA that builds those bonds.
But the same easy, possibly lazy, identification between being Irish and supporting the Democrats starts coming unstuck when you get down to policy.
Voting Democrat means valuing government investment in healthcare and education, supporting minority rights and tax cuts for the less-well-off. It means the right to choose, equal opportunities for minorities, and caring for Gore's adopted baby, the environment.
The Democratic agenda runs parallel to old-style European social democracy ideals, updated to make them market-led but not market-driven. Some Irish politicians share them. When the cookie crumbles, however, the agenda played out in Irish politics begins to resemble closely Republican beliefs.
Republican voters prefer not to spend much tax revenue on healthcare and public schools, and like tax cuts to target the best-off (trickledown effect, they argue). They oppose all rights to choose, minimise equal opportunities for minorities, and figure that if any American makes a few bucks out of chopping down forests, burning coal or sending poisonous emissions into the atmosphere, then no ornery conference in Kyoto has the right to stop them earning their living.
Looking to relations with the wider world, Democrats say they believe their country's role is not only about economics, although it is largely predicated on economic interests. Republicans claim to prefer to stay at home.
While faith-based attitudes play a background role, the Democrats are committed to a secular society that respects the rights of different faith communities. The Republicans are operating to the agenda of the fundamentalist Christian right, an ideology linked to the obsessiveness Arthur Miller dramatised in The Crucible, which drove prohibition and later the blacklisting shame of the 1950s.
BUSH, for example, is a family values man who never spells out exactly what that means. It doesn't mean Hispanic families, or African Americans, or any whites living on welfare. It means, or seems to, his family and the families of his sponsors and social class - the families able to pull strings to get their children into expensive schools and then into Ivy League colleges, even when, as Five Seven Live revealed about Bush's own academic career, their grades don't get them there.
Gore is a family values man too, but his lack of clarity about what that means kept Clinton far from his campaign, and probably lost him Arkansas and Tennessee. Hillary Clinton won upstate New York promoting family values, such as caring for "our" children, leaving it loose enough to swing some floating Republicans.
You don't often witness so many Irish politicians lining up to support the same team. But if the Irish imagine themselves as Democrats within US politics, how is it their agenda differs perceptibly when it comes closer to home?
The question floated to Irish voters about whether they felt closer to Berlin or Boston imagined Boston as a Democratic American dream - but one with hard-core Republican economic and social policies. Berlin was characterised as a government-dominated bureaucracy, just as Washington appears to Bush.
Irish politicians like to believe they embrace the spirit of the US Democratic Party, yet the tears they shed about George W. Bush's possible election are pure crocodile. Gore may not have been the ideal Democratic candidate; Bush may not be the first choice of most Irish-Americans. But put policy into practice locally, and it's Bush who represents the Irish middle ground.
mruane@irish-times.ie