Late summer is not the best time to run a campaign if the people you want to attract are likely to be far away from their normal concerns, perhaps in sunny second homes, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
And yet September's torpor in the North has been disturbed by what a cheeky local commentator christened "a rustling in the azaleas" - an unusual outburst of affluent angst, though some of the less well-off have far better cause for complaint.
What's rustled the azaleas is, of course, rates bills: massive hikes in prospect for the most expensive houses. (I write as a householder at the modest end of the top, so to speak, whose bill will more than double.) The proposal has been inching foggily in from the horizon for years, which explains some of the dismay. Unlike council tax in England, there are to be no caps here on the maximum payable, no single occupancy discounts, though landlords get exemptions.
Legitimate grievance is not hard to find: single householders living on pensions, elderly couples in big crumbling houses that constitute most of their wealth.
Yet most of those who will pay more face increases of less than £150.
The motor of this protest hums like a pricy engine, and some of the loudest voices have been full of the sound of money. Meetings in Belfast were held in a modest hall with a spokesperson of some experience. House-owners in the embattled university district, beset already by ill-behaved student neighbours, described the proposed rates rise as the last straw.
There were also cries of injustice from the owners of grand Victorian villas off the Malone Road - where the first Belfast house sale of £1 million was recorded several years ago.
Radio phone-ins and letters to the papers have been bolstered by petitions.
Clipboards were pressed on shopkeepers to be kept on the counter and customers urged to sign. Sunday morning signatures were collected outside churches both Protestant and Catholic. A display of rare cross-community solidarity, it was also final proof that the last bastions have long fallen. The "azaleas" are a jokey reference to a sub-set dubbed the "Garden Centre Prods" by unkind sociologists, professional and amateur - supposedly unionists who usually sniff at politics, who came out to give the 1998 agreement a majority of Protestant votes by the narrowest margin, then returned to their flower-beds and slammed the garden gate, content to take their chances with direct rule over Stormont shenanigans.
Like the priciest housing, the garden centres went ecumenical some time back. Not total change, though: an advance survey told ministers before this measure was drafted that more of those hit hardest would be Protestant than Catholic.
The most cruel interpret the rates proposal as first reverse for a class which swanned through the Troubles with something like impunity, some of whom the Troubles enriched. An imitation of English home counties/
Dublin 4 lifestyle has been possible in the North at much more modest outlay, thanks principally to lower house prices. Now prices are soaring, yet the first sign of rates doing likewise brings apoplexy.
Peter Hain's administration has tried to present this as another inducement to restore devolved government. Share power and you can cap your own rates, Mr Hain's under-minister, David Hanson, tells the political parties. The response has been fudgy, in the main. Last week Mr Hanson said only 10 per cent of the members of the Assembly had written to him about the proposed rises.
Many have been trying to make points subtly, for good reason. One DUP spokesman was scathing about the suggestion that a devolved administration could magic away the increase: charlatans, he called the politicians who suggested protest might stop or cap it. The uncomfortable fact is that 55 per cent will be better off with the new rates - those in less expensive housing, DUP and Sinn Féin voters for the most part.
Beyond the hardest cases, sure-footing for indignation is scarce. The money has to be raised somehow, the government's accountants say cheerily. Capping will benefit those in the most expensive homes rather than deal with hardship. Relief for the 5 per cent at the top, many with second homes in Ireland or much farther afield, would mean £30 a year more for everyone else.
Much play has been made of the fact that council tax on the house in ritzy Connaught Square, to which the prime ministerial family may be headed sooner than he likes, is capped at £3,000, and that Mr Hain will pay less than that. Some here may indeed have to pay well over £10,000.
The real pain is to those whose homes are their only wealth, faced now with forced sale and upheaval in old age. Deal or no deal, that needs official recognition. But redistributing the cost of government in the direction of those who can best afford it should gladden every civic heart.