Brawler Brian shaping up to be a natural leader

YOU never know which Brian Cowen out are going to meet on any given day — the indolent clerk or the guy who’s surreptitiously sneaked into the phone booth to slip on his Super Biffo outfit.

Yesterday as he pranced athletically onto the stage at Fianna Fáil headquarters, we knew that it was Brian Brawl and not Brian Drawl who turned up for the gig.

And his Mission Impossible was this: BertieGate was still dragging on. FF were faring as well in the polls as the Irish Eurovision entry. Every other trick that FF tried had either fallen flat (pensions and stamp duty) or had been sidelined by BertieGate (the FF manifesto). He needed to turn it all around.

Yesterday, at his party’s briefing, Cowen gave a bravura performance. It harked back to the old days of rough-and-tumble barracking.

And with loud aplomb, he employed the magician’s trick of misdirection expertly — for as we watched and listened BertieGate disappeared before our eyes.

Cowen upped the tempo of the FF campaign, introduced a new attack-dog phase, and steered the discourse away from his leader’s personal finances to the bigger issues, those of the economy.

And as such, he paved the way for the theme for the second half of the campaign. To halt its slide, FF tactically needed to bring the debate around to the big picture of the economy.

If the first fortnight of the campaign was all about Bertie Ahern’s credibility, then the last 10 days would be about Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte’s competence (or alleged lack thereof).

And the key message from FF yesterday was that the spending promises of the Mullingar Accord just don’t stack up.

In 40 minutes of non-stop action, Cowen packed his prose with colourful phrases. The opposition were going to “bust” their promises. They were doing a “con job”. Only his figures “stacked”.

His thesis was that Rabbitte and Kenny had committed to a €2.8 billion framework but had already individually made €5.7bn worth of promises.

This was a typical blast: “You can’t go around spending the money two times, three times or four times. We (FF) have set out the position where we are only spending it once.

“The others are saying: ‘Whatever you’re having yourself.’ What part is coming off the table the day they go into Government?”

From 18 months out, from their think-in in September 2005, it was clear that FF’s prime strategy would be to dwell on its record and the macro-economic narrative.

Yesterday, he railed furiously at the notion that his policies and the Mullingar Accord’s were indistinguishable.

“The commentary thus far in relation to this election is that we have a Tweedle Dum Tweedle Dee situation. We do not. We have far from it,” he snorted.

Again and again he baited the opposition. “Come in and answer Cowen’s questions. (Our figures) stack up,” he bawled.

With this tactic, FF are obviously trying to redirect the direction of the campaign.

They are trying to probe a reputed soft underbelly within FG — Enda Kenny’s reputed lack of mastery on economic issues.

Of course, there was some disingenuous stuff to it. As Richard Bruton of FG said, the FF figures stack up only until they enter into a coalition arrangement when all bets will be off.

And in that sense, FG and Labour have had latitude to showcase their own non-agreed policies — all subject to negotiation.

The opposition yesterday portrayed Cowen’s high-octane attack as hysterical. And while it was full of bluster and hyperbole, he achieved what he set out to do — to up the tempo and to regain control of the agenda that FF has lost in the past two weeks.

Cowen’s interventions have become increasingly important for FF. When he waded in last October to defend the Taoiseach, he arguably changed the course of that controversy.

The more you look at him, too, the more you see a natural FF leader shaping up.