Probably the best line came from a caller to Wednesday's Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). And I paraphrase: after years of plugging away, the Undecideds have finally won the day.
At the Thursday time of writing, the Undecideds still hold sway. And The Irish Times radio review column of last Saturday, in which I didn't so much complain as lament on behalf of my expatriate soul about the absence of the US election from the airwaves, reads now like a bit of a sick joke. Sure, half the calls to Wednesday's Liveline (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) were from feckin' Florida.
We have listened amazed to the transformation of the race between Gush and Bore - as Rodney Rice har-de-har-hardly called them on Tuesday's pre-count After Dark (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday to Thursday) - from plastic-laminated snoozefest into the Highest Political Drama since Caesar bled all over the Forum. And frankly it's been a little absurd. And a lot hysterical.
And hardly at all historical. Where were all the Gore (Vidal, I mean) fans to remind us how the Republicans stole a crucial late19th-century election, as recounted - sorry - in Vidal's novel 1876? At least Eamon Dunphy on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) saw fit to mention Kennedy's - ahem - assisted victory in 1960, even if his citations owed more to enthusiasm than precision recall. (Some 100,000 Republican votes at the bottom of Lake Michigan? Come on, Eamon, JFK's Illinois margin of victory was only 4,000 odd.)
Some of Dunphy's Yank guests weren't prepared to wear the presenter's use of the F-word. Fraud? Please. The guy from Time magazine was more interested in rolling out the Timely paeans to the way this mess confirms the wondrous glories of US democracy. Practically everyone was getting a bit overwrought.
That's why my favourite perverse moment came shortly before 3 a.m. Wednesday on America Decides (BBC Radio 5 Live).
Permanently breathless presenter Paul Allen turned to his latest studio guest, Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institute, and "asked", as was his wont: "So have you ever seen anything like this??!!"
"Sure," Hess replied.
Don't get me wrong. There's a pretty good yarn in this election - don't count on all the shenanigans emerging in a coherent narrative - and the suspense is rather magnified by the significance of the job at stake and the way two extraordinary similar candidates still manage to polarise 100 million people.
But the hype is truly shameless: after the first, quadrennial burst of "what a big turnout", it quietly emerged that, actually, no, it wasn't; and the high-horsery about the US networks' bad call in Florida is a bit rich from British commentators after the exitpoll farce of Britain's 1992 general election.
Radio in our airspace didn't tell the yarn especially well. I was told on Tuesday that Dublin community station Anna Livia would be carrying the National Public Radio coverage live from the US; sadly, it never happened - Anna Livia just plugged in the World Radio Network instead. WRN sometimes carries NPR, but not election night - switching over to Anna Livia at various times through the night I heard how (3 a.m.) the US election could affect Canada (not much, seemingly), how (4 a.m.) Poland is approaching EU expansions and how (5 a.m.) Finland is expanding Internet training opportunities.
Which basically left BBC Radio 5 Live and the appalling Mr Allen - who came on air at midnight and by 1.30 a.m. was talking like he and his panel had survived weeks of artillery barrage. As late as 4.45 a.m., with the major candidates separated by a sliver in Florida, with Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin up for grabs and New Hampshire swung to Bush, he sneered his way out of a report from Green headquarters; the Nader campaign, he said, "has proven to be an irrelevance".
Allen's "expert" number-cruncher from Mori wasn't much better. Once he'd confused third-party candidates George Wallace (1968) and Henry Wallace (1948), I thought I'd better watch TV. Here the flashing maps and unmistakable numbers were a relief, and Sky News also brought CBS coverage, with Dan Rather telling us races were "tick-tight" and that a Gore loss based on failing in Tennessee "would be Shakespearean".
But then Sky panel-man Dick Morris told us to go to bed, Gore had won - I think he mistook Kentucky for Tennessee on a CBS map - and I wasn't having that. Neither were some Republicans: one of the party's young fogeys appeared on Sky to cast doubts on the Florida forecast, and optimisticly spoke - with no irony whatsoever - what could prove to be this election's epitaph: "Jeb Bush controls the apparatus for absentee-balloting in Florida".
RADIO 5 Live, in fairness, had got there first. Unabashed right-wing panelist Paul Peletier was lively all night, and was quickly in after the first Florida declaration for Gore: "A lot of people are going to have egg on their faces" for this premature declaration, he said. The new senator from New York was obviously a particular Peletier favourite, eliciting boiler-plate misogyny, grotesquely adapting rape imagery: "Hillary Clinton has grabbed the Democratic Party by the short hairs and is forcing it to her will".
Back on the Walkman or the car radio, 5 Live was loud if not entirely clear on medium wave. But early on Tuesday evening its own rights difficulties in Glasgow kept Rangers' crucial Champions League match off the air. Rival station TalkSport's presenter of Football First, however, proved himself a phrase-maker worthy of the White House: "And Rangers have brought on Neil McCann for Jorg Albertz - manager Dick Advocaat has rolled his last dice into the hat."
hbrowne@irish-times.ie