Aleese's campaign earlier this week, Mary Harney said a president "needs to touch everybody". So yesterday Prof McAleese set out on that long and arduous process, touching hundreds of people on a whirlwind tour of Louth and Meath.
She shook hands, slapped backs and, yes, embraced everything she met, like a cross between Bertie Ahern and the Holy Spirit. By the time she reached Navan at teatime, she was even kissing babies. ail and the Progressive Democrats.
She is, in short, a natural election campaigner. A starch-free Mary Robinson, equally at ease chatting with young women at the hairdressers, or with oul' fellas in the pub, and her main sponsors are loving every bit of it.
The speeches by Fianna Fail organisers at the various venues along the route had a common theme. "A candidate we can be proud of," they said, and you knew they weren't faking it. The party's big problem yesterday was trying not to look smug.
She was nearly too good. More than once during the day, the campaign team had to send a snatch squad into a shop or office to get its woman out. After one such rescue operation in Dundalk RTC, she was nudged forward down a corridor with a muttered: "Keep walking." "I'm going, I'm going," she muttered in return.
In Drogheda the chairwoman of the local Fianna Fail comhairle ceanntar, Marie Dunne, cast a practised eye on the candidate and liked what she saw. "I have looked at your carriage in the last couple of weeks and I've been very impressed. I never liked Mary Robinson's carriage, but you're a very elegant woman".
They needed a dual carriageway in Dundalk yesterday, when Mary Banotti's entourage hit the town hall about the time the FF/PD team was touring a local shopping centre. This is classified as a "near-miss" in electoral aviation terms, and sources said the two women actually merged on the radar at one point. A meeting, however, was avoided.
There were few hiccups all day. Pressed on the continuing controversy over Ray Burke, Prof McAl eese bowed with great agility to the "collective wisdom" of her two proposing parties. When a Northern TV crew put it to her that in matters religious she had "nailed her colours to the mast", she briefly bared the sort of teeth her dentist husband would be proud of. "Is being Catholic a problem?" she wondered.
When the interviewer suggested she had "campaigned" in the referendums on abortion, she countered: "When did I do that? You'll have to refresh my memory," before saying she had no active part in either campaign.
Most of the day, however, she confined herself to just embracing things, physically and metaphorically. In Dundalk, the message had been that the McAleese homestead in Rostrevor had the "Mourne Mountains at one side and the Cooley mountains on the other".
As the campaign moved south through Meath, it was her former home in Dunshaughlin that became the theme. Even in Navan, she knew a lot of people by their first names. When an expectant mother congratulated her at the shopping centre, she shot back: "We're both looking forward to big events, Margaret."
