Only thing Cowen has left to lose is the election

AFTER losing control of the economy, the respect of the voters and even what was left of loyalty to him within Fianna Fáil, Brian Cowen now knows he has only one thing further to lose — the general election. And he’s determined to put that date with disaster off for as long as possible.

As Cabinet colleagues scent political blood like circling sharks waiting for the precise moment to strike, and junior ministers openly jockey for post-Cowen position, the caretaker Taoiseach is already being air-brushed from history.

He remains Fianna Fáil chief purely because no one else wants to lead the party’s bedraggled and beaten-down soldiers to their electoral destiny.

And all the while the Greens carry on their sorry tradition in this Government and simper impotently from the sidelines, too timid to follow through their public pledge to force a late January election.

If they had been serious about their November 21 promise to trigger elections in the second half of this month, they could have insisted on fast-tracking the Finance Bill, rather than merely squeezing a few extra Dáil days out of Fianna Fáil.

Mr Cowen is clearly determined to implement Operation Shamrock and — effectively — gatecrash the White House on St Patrick’s Day to try and wrap himself in whatever kudos the annual photo-op would leave him with — but that political vanity and cynicism could do yet more damage to the Irish economy than has already been visited upon it.

The trip to the White House is a vital global showcase for Ireland Inc — particularly when the nation now has its begging bowl out.

But what is the point of wasting such precious “face time” with President Barack Obama and the Congressional leadership on a Taoiseach about to be tossed from office?

Surely, the opportunity needs to go to a freshly elected leader who can claim he has a mandate to drag the country back off its knees?

US leaders were reportedly very annoyed when it emerged Bertie Ahern would be using his prestigious 2008 invite to address both Houses of Congress as his political swan song as he hastily announced his resignation after the historic invitation had been given and all that unpleasantness spewed out of the Mahon corruption probe.

If the Irish side is now seen to trash the White House invite for its own crass political agenda again, there must be a strong chance the administration will drastically scale back the visit in future.

The ceremony was a concoction of the Irish Embassy and the Reagan White House in the early 1980s and has grown dramatically since then, but Obama is the first president in two decades to have no input into, or real interest in, the Northern peace process. He knows there is little point in playing the O’Bama green card to the estimated 36 million Americans who claim Irish descent for his re-election next year.

FF strategists now see March 25 as their optimum date for a general election in the hope that something, anything, will turn up by then. FF is not as low as 13% as some opinion polls suggest, its bedrock support — even after the IMF national humiliation — is probably around 20% and Mr Cowen’s brief flicker back to political life before Christmas showed him to be a tribal leader, not a national one, who was determined to energise his base, rather than communicate with the nation as a whole.

The Greens know their record in power is threadbare without even a climate change bill — their self-proclaimed reason for getting into bed with FF — to show for their time propping up the most unpopular administration since polling began. John Gormley is clearly tempted that he might be thrown a few crumbs at this late stage of the game to keep Mr Cowen as the living political dead that month or two longer.

But it is a very dangerous game to play. I covered Westminster in the dying days of the hated John Major administration and the parallels with FF are redolent. After smashing the Tory reputation for economic competence, the Conservatives clung onto power for every extra second they could in the hope they would somehow turn things around. The result was that for every extra day they squatted in office, the public just despised them that extra bit more and the inevitable election defeat was transformed into a once in a generation wipe-out.

Mr Cowen’s shabby manoeuvring is only leading his party down the same path to a polling booth bloodbath.