The US presidential campaign has sorely lacked mischief and impropriety. We could teach them a thing or two, writes Ann Marie Hourihane.
PITY THE poor Americans. Their presidential election is so devoid of political scandal - so far - that their journalists are forced to work night and day to make some up. Last week the New York Times published the astounding news that one of the contenders for Republican nomination, John McCain, had not had a sexual relationship with a lobbyist eight years ago. The newspaper seems to have been sitting on the story since last December.
Talk about slim pickings.
It is true that the lobbyist allegedly concerned, Vicki Iseman, is blonde, female (thank God, eh?) and was in her early 30s at the time of the alleged relationship.
So far, so good.
However, both she and McCain have strongly denied that they had an affair. So has McCain's wife, Cindy, who has said that her husband "would never do anything not only to disappoint our family, but to disappoint the people of America".
Even McCain's main rival for the Republican party's nomination as its presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, has come to the defence of his opponent, calling him "a good, decent, honourable man".
How unlike the home life of our own dear reprobates. Every time they go out their front door - that is, if they really own their front doors - they have to step over a scandal that has materialised on their doorstep, like a foundling child, the previous night. We are lucky enough, as a country, to be rich in political scandal. It seems to be one of our few natural resources. We are tripping over it.
We could export it; well, actually we did export it once upon a time, to America, but they seem to have recovered.
The most wonderful thing about our level of political scandal is that we are so scandal heavy that we will never, under any circumstances whatsoever, be embarrassed into having to make it up.
Indeed, as exhausted political correspondents are left panting from their note-taking marathons at Dublin Castle and shouting down their microphones at the rest of us, they have been heard to admit that they could not make it up if they tried.
We are more like the Japanese, you see. We have lived for years in a jungle of scandal, but we have always managed to avoid seeing it. We're kind of inscrutable about scandal.
We vote back the politicians who are most tainted with scandal, as if nothing at all had happened. Then we act all surprised and hurt when it turns out that they are mired in scandal. Truly we are an exotic culture.
It's a miracle when you think about it. There are the Americans, more than 300 million of them, and they have not produced one decent scandal in this presidential campaign so far. And here are we, four million souls clinging to a lonely rock in the Atlantic, and yet we produce enough political scandal to have the New York Times hospitalised, if it ever found out about it.
And we work with so little: a tiny country, paltry sums, modest houses. It's as if Caligula was operating out of Lilliput. Talk about lucky.
This is not to say that American politics is now without scandals, it's just that American politicians seem to have an uncanny knack for remembering them and, in extreme cases, learning from them.
Hillary Clinton was involved in the Whitewater scandal, which was never properly explained, but she has grown more cautious since. Barack Obama has had a minor controversy about plagiarising someone else's speeches, but that is pretty small beer. Sure our little Fine Gael fellas do that before they're out of short pants.
And John McCain was once one of the so-called Keating Five, who were accused of trying to influence banking regulators on behalf of a millionaire subsequently convicted of fraud.
McCain was found by the Senate ethics committee to have employed "poor judgment". This experience so mortified McCain, so discomfited him, that he has campaigned against political corruption ever since. He has been particularly tough on the issue of campaign contributions, and has alienated members of his own party as a result.
Under the new rules, which he campaigned for, McCain will not even accept free rides in private planes. And they call that a democracy.
The New York Times story rests on its assertion that back in 1999 McCain was too often in the company of Vicki Iseman at public functions. This seems a rather strange indication of adultery, but rumours have been based on less.
It was presumably for this reason that McCain's staff, according to the New York Times, advised their man to stop being seen with Vicki Iseman at parties.
The conservative Republicans, who loathe McCain, loathe the New York Times even more, and now that McCain is being attacked by the New York Times - if you can call this an attack - the conservatives are rallying behind him. So, not only is this an exposure of non-scandal, it is an exposure of non-scandal which has backfired.
And, you know, it's a problem we're never going to have.
Ann Marie Hourihane's column will appear each Monday. John Waters's column will appear on Fridays.