There is something unconvincing, not quite real, about this election. I don't think it's just me, writes John Waters
Not long ago, general elections were national orgies of collective enmity, argument and intrigue. Nowadays they seem peripheral events, intensely participated in by a minority.
I'm not talking about the turnout, but about something deeper in how we see politics and seek to participate in it. In spite of odd sensational happenings, the public imagination remains largely unstirred by Election '07.
For some time, politics has been losing its grip on the collective imagination, reducing to a sideshow, like horse racing or astanga yoga, things people may be interested in for reasons specific to their personalities, but which a majority regards as distant and rather puzzling phenomena.
In part this is because our political system has devolved most of its power upwards. Growing public cynicism is blamed also, but I think we need to be more specific. What we call cynicism is really a rationalisation of something happening for different and good reasons.
It isn't really that people have lost faith in politicians, but that our lives have changed so profoundly that the distance between us and politics has widened gradually over an extended period. Once we were close to our leaders, depending on them for all kinds of immediate things. Now they are, at best, distant technocrats whom we see in the flesh only at election time.
This has changed the way we feel about politics, which is mainly about feeling. During the 2004 local elections, a survey conducted by a group working out of UCC confirmed a suspicion that elections are turning into "beauty" contests. The results indicated that, when the ballot paper carries a photograph, female voters tend to vote for young, good-looking male candidates, males for good-looking women, with older candidates polling lowest. The research was conducted using mock ballot papers with faces of candidates from one of the Dublin constituencies. There was later found to be a high degree of similarity between the survey and how these candidates fared in the real vote.
This suggests that traditional political commentary, with its emphasis on issues and politics, may have lost touch with what is really happening. Most of us now suspect that, whatever makes our modern societies tick, it has little to do with those faces grinning down from every pole in the country. Elections have always been about drama, and therefore more about emotions than policies and issues, which matter only as material for the storyline. Increasingly, elections are dramas without substance.
Perhaps what mainly distinguishes politics now from the politics of my childhood is that, whereas back then there were a thousand different dramas every day, each confined to a place and a moment, there is now one great drama happening continuously on the same stage for the duration of a campaign, but disconnected from any actually existing reality on the ground. The pundits afterwards take the outcome of the drama and reduce it to a judgment on issues and policies, and we all pretend to go along with this.
If politics is about how we feel, I would say that, after the first week of this campaign, we feel the incumbent Government to be struggling. This feeling has nothing to do with the record of the Government or the analyses or proposals of the alternatives, but arises from a sense picked up from a series of images of the past week - mainly to do with the Taoiseach's finances. And it is not so much that the charges have developed substance as that Mr Ahern's body-language suggests he is uncomfortable about something. For an audience raised on Coronation Street, that is enough.
But I was impressed by the analysis of a woman canvassing for an Independent candidate in Roscommon at the weekend who told me that people are too scared to vote out the Government - "everyone has too much money borrowed". This sounds sensible, and the polls seem to bear her out.
Personally, I think the crucial factor in this election will be the weather. For the past couple of weeks, the unseasonal sunshine has provided a metaphorical reprise of the past decade of prosperity, and if polling occurs in a similar climate, this should be enough to put Bertie back in, regardless of other matters. To change a government requires real anger and it is impossible for Irish people to be angry when the sun is shining. If the rain returns, however, the negatives will gain power, as the metaphysical anger of a sodden public seeks a worthy target.
If polling day is wet and the forecast bad, I think the abiding sense of this election will be that it occurred at the end of a period of massive prosperity which was mainly thrown away. Then the drama of Bertie's finances may become important as the people seek a pretext for a terrible vengeance on those who have sought power but were powerless to stop the rain.