THERE was a kind of children's book when I was growing up which had a long version and a short version of the story on each page. Text and soundbite, so to speak. If you wanted to find out if Rupert and Bill Badger made it back from their inadvertent trip on the UFO, you read the soundbite version under the pictures.
If you wanted to know what fuelled the UFO and how worried Rupert's mother was, you read the longer version.
This general election went to the short version. In many newspapers, you didn't have to read the text to find the soundbites (Michael Lowry talking about selling cattle and buying votes), the gaffes (too many and too minor to mention) and the summaries: they were broken out for you, Beanofashion.
O ye of short attention span, no matter what your politics, your time has come.
I suspect nobody went quicker to the bad news soundbite sections than the individual Fianna Fail candidate who is in the habit of viewing election campaigns as predictable meltdowns where somebody puts their foot in the party's mouth.
This causes the initial high euphoria over polls to wither to the point where the party ends up, sadly defiant, quoting its own polls which mysteriously contradict IMS and MRBI, not to mention the end result of the election.
This time there was such a welcome lack of bad soundbites for Fianna Fail that it would almost make one regret pulling out of politics (I jest). Indeed, the Politics of Shame game has been played out to Fianna Fail's disadvantage so often over the past decade that a watchful surprise was the reaction of party candidates to the shiny photographs of Bertie Ahern and to the welcome they got on the doorsteps.
"We may be OK up to today, but they probably have something up their sleeve," went the thinking.
Running beneath the print and electronic coverage was a thin stream of rumour: journalists being taken aside and told as gospel some suggestion about a candidate's private life which - the journalist was promised - could be verified by checking with X or Y. Journalists who tried the verification process and found nothing were often annoyed enough to go to the candidate about whom the rumour had been spread to let him or her know about it.
ALTHOUGH intended as a kindness, this sharing can be experienced by the candidate as a devastating threat: if this journalist has had the rumour peddled to him or her, who knows how many others have also heard about it? The candidate begins to wonder, at the beginning of any chat with a journalist, if this person is privy to the rumour and, as a consequence, tends to lose confidence and clarity.
In general, however, the Politics of Shame was not much in play this time against Fianna Fail. Own goals were minimal and well managed, notably John Browne's unexpected foray.
Neither minimal nor well managed were the PDs' own goals. A crucial miscalculation, in my view, was the overemphasis on their leader, justified in the PDs' thinking by her preeminent position in opinion polls. I am convinced there is an undiscovered Law of Opinion Polls which is akin to the undiscovered Law of Haircuts. The law about haircuts says that on the day that three people tell you your hair is really lovely, it means you'll need to get a haircut the following week. It's perfect: and it's on the cusp of imperfection.
It's much the same with opinion polls. Mary Harney's popularity was on the cusp when the party decided to go for broke on her identity and face.
Throughout the campaign, the decline was precipitate and not helped by the resolute grim monotone of her approach. Fortunately, Ms Harney is young enough to learn from this experience. Fortunately, too, she and her team had the wit not to allow themselves to be painted into a corner by headlines suggesting that Bertie Ahern had beaten them into abject submission on issues like the 25,000 public service workers.
Necessity is the mother of cohesion. Fianna Fail and the PDs started the election as two separate political parties, each with its own policies. However, they were forced to present themselves as an alternative government and did so with some competence.
The much iterated journalistic theme that this was a boring campaign is an interesting example of a self fulfilling self affirming prophecy with damn all behind it. Anybody who checks through the newspapers of the past couple of weeks, paying particular attention to the long single column sections at the edge of the pages where short extracts from press releases were printed, will find material aplenty on every issue under the sun.
All of the parties have become more efficient at producing press releases rather than pointless, lengthy, unmade speeches and more effective at putting their arguments in quotable emotive terms. At least two topics - the environment and disability - justified much greater media examination than they got.
BUT there were lots of alternatives available to editors and reporters. There were opinion polls. There were comparative grids, where the bones of each party's policies could be put in blocks. Above all, there were "colour pieces". More colour flowed in this election than you'd find on a palette of oil paints.
Most of the colour pieces focused on location; the facial landing point of a kiss received nearly as many column inches as the hiding place of Michael McDowell.
In a campaign notable for the downsizing of the importance of almost every party's front bench in favour of their leader, the PDs' downsizing of Mr McDowell was so pronounced as to be counter effective. Journalists ended up playing hunt the Panama hat, and McDowell, in turn, announced that rumours of him being rubbed out were greatly exaggerated.
The atmosphere and expectations within each party at the beginning of the campaign shifted radically a third of the way through.
One wouldn't suggest that, at the beginning, the Rainbow partners were smug, complacent and self satisfied. They were probably only doing a pretty good imitation of smug, complacent and self satisfied as they presented themselves everywhere as an inseparable threesome to be judged on their record.
Fianna Fail had made the decision to face up to a perceived negative Ahern factor by putting the man centre stage at all times. It was a decision with a much greater payoff than could have been expected. The Bertie factor became the single most positive element of the campaign. Even failure to have their man TV ready for the "Big Debate" should not detract from the credit due to the strategists.
For the Rainbow, however, not only did the sunshine melt the smugness, but something of a Dick Spring factor emerged; these factors, in aggregate, rattling the Taoiseach into a debate on demand stance.
Equally rattled was Dick Spring, who clearly underwent intensive remedial smiling classes late in the campaign, having earlier 09 become progressively tetchier on the RTE Sunday lunchtime news programme when Gerald Barry sought the Tanaiste's reaction to some comments from this columnist.
Moire Geoghegan Quinn, he eventually allowed through almost audibly gritted teeth, was a journalist and (so) entitled to her opinion.
Thanks, Tanaiste. It's always good to have one's civil rights defended. But even as a TD, I did have the same entitlement. As will the newly elected Labour TDs. They have an entitlement to even quite forceful opinions about possible coalitions with Fianna Fail if the matter should arise.