The old joke in Chicago is that the Mayor, Richard M. Daley, feels that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the Irish and the damn Polacks. It's not a bad line but it was cut to the style of Daley's late father, Richard J. Daley, the old-style machine Boss. Today, the gag has outlived its aptness.

Daley jnr has survived as a new Democrat. He has worked like a beaver building bridges and coalitions. He has given a little piece to everybody and taken a little less back from his friends.

It is not worth your while to be on his wrong side.

He is the perfect creature of the Clinton era, where liberal politicians have evolved into focus group junkies, pulling the needs of various communities and constituencies together until they have enough critical mass to go and fight the brassy right.

The right, it was ever so, has the easier job of selling self-interest. Comforting the comfortable, afflicting the afflicted and so on.

Daley is an Al Gore supporter. Not just that, he is more surefooted than Gore. Daley's political antennae will have been quivering with alarm these past weeks as the debate between Gore and Bill Bradley turned into a backstreet rumble.

Gore has been reinvented by a team of experts, including the polemicist, Naomi Wolfe. The results are amusing. Gore has been identified as something called a "beta male". This is bad but not terminal. By merely rolling up his sleeves and wearing cowboy boots he can appear to be an "alpha male", a species which, according to focus group studies, voters find attractive so long as they keep their paws off the interns.

As a new feisty "alpha male", albeit one with lingering problems at the polls, Gore has taken to poking Bradley in the ribs and kicking sand in his face. Bradley came to Chicago a short while ago and for the first time responded. Bradley's healthcare proposals are the key to his credentials in this election.

Gore has found the flashpoint. Bradley has had no choice but to respond.

Daley the bridge builder can't have liked what he heard.

Clinton and Gore came to power in 1992 having stitched together a coalition of interest groups whose needs Clinton seemed perfectly to synthesise as he wandered the electoral highway wantonly feeling the pain of others.

Amassing that breadth of support was a delicate affair and the coherence of the centre fell apart during the great Clinton healthcare debacle of 1994. The Republicans defeated Clinton but the fissures among the Democrats made it easy.

Those old wounds are opening up again. The first bloodstains were left on the floor in Chicago when Bradley sideswiped to the effect that Gore has abandoned the "fundamental democratic principle of basic healthcare for all Americans".

This sort of insult is a prompt for much eyeball rolling and theatrical yawning among Republicans. For Democrats, your ideas on healthcare define what sort of Democrat you are. To be against healthcare for all Americans is to be a bad Democrat.

Yet this is to be the theme of the Democratic hustings. Bradley and Gore, after months of ignoring each other, followed by a period where each complimented the other vaguely on his fine character, have found their flickknives.

IN the seven years in which they were in the Senate together until 1992, Gore and Bradley went through the gates for 2,137 roll call votes and voted the same way 79 per cent of the time. Healthcare is the issue which divides them more bitterly than anything else; it is the issue on which memories are most raw and the item on the agenda which could leave the Democrats with a wounded candidate who has no prospect of cobbling together another coalition.

Gore is particularly sensitive about 1994. History (and Gore's chances now) would look a lot different if the Clinton tenure was remembered for the arrival of one big idea rather than the groping of one big intern.

So Gore will slash and swipe at Bradley until he draws him further out into the open. He needs Bradley to look less like the abstract, loping good guy of the production and more like a savvy politics-as-usual hack. When he drags Bradley into a situation where he must argue over figures, deficits and surpluses he immediately diminishes Bradley.

Besides, this is an old score. In 1993 Bradley called for universal insurance coverage. The next year he declined to back the Clinton-Gore health reform package.

He insisted that the mechanism of forcing small firms to pay for their employees (instead of government picking up the tab) would be counter-productive. Instead he offered his own plan of subsidising government grants with higher taxes on cigarettes, arms sales and on expensive high-coverage health plans. Among the Clintonites resentment lingered.

Years later Gore has resurrected a Clinton healthcare hack, Prof Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University. He has made Thorpe the principal assailant in the Punch and Judy show he would like the Democratic race to become.

The consiglieri in Gore clings to the wreckage of the Clinton deal. The accountant in him clings to the modest trim of his own version. He is offering to spend $312 billion on bringing another 12 million Americans under the health coverage umbrella.

Bradley paints with an altogether bigger stroke. He will spend $1.06 trillion to target low-income groups, children and the elderly for coverage and subsidies. Thorpe claims the expenditure would bring just 15 million uninsured Americans under the umbrella. He concedes, however, that as many as 48 million lower-income families would become eligible for subsidies. Bradley calls the study "biased" and insists he will insure 35 million currently uninsured Americans.

In Chicago and on campaign stops since, Bradley has characterised Gore as a wounded child of 1994: "The lesson Al Gore learned from the healthcare defeat was that big bold things can't get done in Washington, so let's look at the small symbolic things."

WHILE the boys pop away, it is still America outside. Some health insurance companies are reluctantly conceding that a patient's doctor, not his insurance company, can determine when medical intervention is needed.

Some 44.3 million people had no health insurance in 1998, an increase of 1 million from the year before and 11.1 million of the uninsured, according to the US Census Bureau, are under the age of 18. The percentage of uninsured children has risen from 12.4 per cent to 15.4 per cent in the Clinton years. Thirty-four per cent of foreign-born citizens are without coverage.

These are levels of poverty and callousness which are as breathtaking to behold, in their own ugly but epic way, as the Grand Canyon. And lo, Texas, the stomping ground of George W. Bush, the compassionate conservative himself, leads the nation in uninsured citizens.

In Texas 24.5 per cent of the population marches through life uncovered and unprotected.

In an election which will be all about character and the perception of character, the war hero, John McCain, has been closing steadily on George W. The best news for both McCain and Bush would be a bloodbath Democratic primary which pivots on a replay of the biggest policy failure of the Clinton years.

Tom Humphries can be contacted at thumphries@irish-times.ie